Bertrand Russell: Philosopher and Humanist

BERTRAND
RUSSELL

Books by John Lewis

AN INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY

MARXISM AND THE OPEN MIND

RELIGIONS OF THE WORLD MADE SIMPLE
TEACH YOURSELF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY
MARXISM AND THE IRRATIONALISTS

SCIENCE, FAITH AND SCEPTICISM

MAN AND EVOLUTION

THE LIFE AND TEACHING OF KARL MARX

BERTRAND
RUSSELL

Philosopher and Humanist

JOHN LEWIS

1968
LAWRENCE AND WISHART
LONDON

Copyright © John Lewis 1968

Printed in Great Britain by
Clarke, Doble & Brendon Ltd.
Cattedown, Plymouth

OmOnN OOP OD &

CONTENTS

Foreword

The Two Bertrand Russells

The Making of a Philosopher

The One and the Many
Foundations

Some Loose Stones

Mind and Matter

“You're Right if you Think you Are”
Man and His Freedom

Mysticism and Logic

Page

16
23
aS
42
52
66
74
84

FOREWORD

Bertrand Russell has probably made a greater original con-
tribution to philosophy than any other thinker in Great
Britain since Hume. But if his name is better known than
that of any of his contemporaries, this is not entirely due to
his contribution to farmal logic and mathematics or to the
“analytical” method of enquiry which has been so influential
in philosophical thinking. The wider public has been more
concerned with his social and political writings, which
Russell himself believes to have no necessary connection
with his views on logic and epistemology. “On these ques-
tions,” he says, “I did not write in my capacity as a philoso-
pher; I wrote as a human being who suffered from the state
of the world, wished to find some way of improving it, and
was anxious to speak in plain terms to others who had
similar feelings.”

But the fact that there was not for him any “necessary
connection” between these two phases of his thought surely
suggests a surprising inconsistency between the philosopher
and the humanist which can only have the effect of cutting
the ground from beneath his own deepest convictions. It
would appear to be essential for the understanding both of
Russell’s philosophy and his social teaching to examine this
contradiction and to submit to close scrutiny a philosophy so
strangely divorced from real life.

It will not be easy to examine a philosophy based on
logical formulations of some complexity and yet keep within
the limits of comprehensibility as far as the general reader
is concerned, unless the theoretical exposition is somewhat
simplified and the logical technicalities reduced to a mini-

7

mum. But it is hoped that in doing so nothing essential to
Russell’s thinking as a whole will be lost.

It is not the intention in this examination of Russell’s
philosophy to go on to discuss alternatives to those positions
which are criticised. The development of philosophy beyond
or in opposition to Logical Analysis is of considerable import-
ance, but it must remain a matter for separate treatment.

THE TWO BERTRAND RUSSELLS

It is a reasonable supposition that of this century’s
philosophers Bertrand Russell will be longest remembered.
His influence has gone far beyond his native island and
his work is well known not only in America but in Eastern
Europe, India and China. His name is probably better
known than that of any other living British philosopher.
This is not only because of the originality and importance
of his philosophical works but because the very writing of
them displays a lucidity of exposition almost unique among
academic philosophers. He is a great stylist and by the
clarity of his writing, its elegance, and his frequent recourse
to savage irony and mordant wit, has won a Nobel Prize
for Literature as well as securing a readership embracing not
only the academically qualified but a multitude of readers.
For many years his philosophical work has been over-
shadowed by the considerable scale of his social and political
writing. Here his views are much easier to understand, for
while the logical and philosophical discussions deal with
highly abstract conceptions which are far removed from
everyday life, the social discussions move on a common-
sense level and Russell’s views, if not all their implications,
can be easily grasped by the ordinary reader. It is this kind
of activity, his interventions into the political sphere in
particular, which led to his imprisonment for pacifist propa-
ganda in the First World War, and the loss of his Fellow-
ship in Trinity College, Cambridge. When he enters this

9

field, to use his own words, he writes ‘‘as a human being,
who suffers from the state of the world, who wishes to find
some way of improving it, and is anxious to speak in plain
terms to others who have similar feelings”. This has made
him a controversial figure, as influential and often enough
as heartily detested as those earlier philosophers from
Socrates to John Stuart Mill who were as eloquent in the
public forum as they were erudite in the circles of academic
learning. And so Russell after years of abstract philosophis-
ing descends upon the surface of this planet and begins to
reason passionately about war, education, marriage,
socialism. He revives again the role of the philosopher as a
public figure. At a time when academic philosophy was be-
coming increasingly abstruse and remote, he deliberately
left the study in order to criticise, excite and interest ordin-
ary men about the great questions facing humanity.

There are in fact two Russells—the philosopher and the
publicist. He himself is apt to insist on their total separation.
But it is to be doubted whether his philosophical views are
as irrelevant to his social thinking as he is sometimes dis-
posed to believe. He is after all a member of a distinguished
Whig family, the Russells, and of the Stanleys on his
mother’s side, two of the oldest and most famous families
in England, representing the great Whig tradition of liberal
principles and individualist conviction. His grandfather,
Lord John Russell, was a great Liberal Prime Minister,
who fought for Free Trade, universal free education, for
the emancipation of the Jews, for radical reform in every
field. His father, Viscount Amberley, was a rationalist, who
chose John Stuart Mill as the “godfather” of his son.

In the sphere of philosophy Russell inherits the great
tradition of the empirical British philosophers Locke, Hume,
Bentham and Mill, who played a not inconsiderable role
in the political affairs of the seventeenth to nineteenth
centuries. These men were concerned to eliminate from
thinking all superfluous entities and arbitrary assumptions,

10

a procedure which undermined, and was intended to under-
mine, the ecclesiastical sanction of monarchical and auto-
cratic government, and to overthrow obstructive traditional
institutions. This empirical thinking goes even farther back
to the medieval British philosopher William of Ockham,
who first enunciated what came to be the guiding principle
of Russell’s philosophy—‘“‘not to multiply entities unneces-
sarily”. From this followed his unending efforts to reduce
the universe to an ever-diminishing number of irreducible
facts, a process to be achieved by a continuous paring away
of unessential elements. Now this could not but have a
profound influence in every department of human think-
ing, social, ethical, religious and political. It is the impulse
behind Russell’s whole method—sceptical, analytical, des-
tructive of all that could be discarded, whether in philosophy
or in morals, sociology and politics. It was the motive of
his relentless criticism of religion and his merciless attack on
the illogicality of mysticism.*

Behind all his thinking and writing, behind all his social
actions we feel his passionate hostility to all culpable
obscurity of thought, such as he found not only in religion,
but in philosophical speculation and conventional moralis-
ing. This is the one thing for which Russell is without
hesitation to be admired and reverenced, this life-long in-
tellectual honesty and its realisation as a faith. As he once
said : “I wanted certainty in the kind of way in which people
want religious faith.” Though it may seem strange to say
this of so determined a sceptic, there is indeed something
almost religious in his search for impersonal objective truth.
When he entered the field of controversy clarity of thought
and honesty of speech were to sweep like a cleansing stream
through the neuroses and superstitions of the contemporary
mind. The first of all moral laws was to think straight:
“Better the world should perish than that I, or any other
human being, should believe a lie. . . . But that is the religion

1 Mysticism and Logic (1919).
11

of thought, in whose scorching flames the dross of the
world is being burnt away.”””

This passion for intellectual truth was strangely and in-
consistently mingled with quite another devotion—for which
he confessed he could advance no rational grounds what-
ever—the love of humanity. Out of the complexities of his
mathematical formulae and analytical logic there stepped
yet another Russell, and poured out upon statesmen,
ecclesiastics, sober educationists, dogmatic moralists and
those whose finer feelings had been lulled to slumber “by
all the easy speeches that comfort cruel men”, a flood of
polemics that did not stop no matter how violently he was
denounced or whatever steps were taken to silence him. In
America he was judicially pronounced unfit to occupy the
chair of philosophy in the City College of New York, and
not long afterwards he was peremptorily dismissed from the
Barnes Foundation in Pennsylvania. The Russell who had
set out to be a disembodied intellect now revealed himself
as the prophet of moral idealism.

It is this phase of his life, increasingly absorbing all his
attention and energies, that has directed attention away from
his philosophical thinking and its profound and penetrating
influence on the deeper levels of contemporary thinking.
This neglect of his philosophy has also been encouraged by
the interest attracted to his personality by his recent Auto-
biography. We have found ourselves more concerned with
his childhood and youth, his developing mind, the influence
of his grandmother Lady Russell and his Cambridge friends,
his affairs of the heart and his marriage; until the thinker
all but disappears and the engaging eccentric fills the picture.
His indisputable intellectual reputation, his unfailing charm,
his genuine courage and indefatigable vigour at a great age,
have all endeared him to the public, still charmed by his
wit and by his rapier-like effectiveness in debate. We have
even grown indulgent towards his heresies and dissenting

* Ibid.
12

protests, at the same time that we are increasingly indifferent
to the basic principles of his powerful and disturbing phil-
osophy. All may be forgiven in so venerable and attractive
a figure, whose independence of mind, aristocratic manner
and precise eighteenth century voice witness so continu-
ously to his undying concern for human dignity, for mercy,
and for social justice.

This is not the tribute which the philosopher himself
would wish to receive. It has in it something almost insult-
ing, when it concerns a man like Russell. It is an indignity
to have the philosophy which has re-directed the current
of fundamental] thinking in England and America passed
over as if it were a creditable performance no doubt, and of
interest to the learned, but of no consequence to mankind
in general for whom it appears incomprehensible and irrele-
vant.

It is of course a difficult philosophy to understand.
What important philosophy is not? And it is rendered more
so because Russell is not the kind of philosopher who thinks
out his system once and for all and never subsequently
modifies it. On the contrary he will be found to be continu-
ally developing, modifying or changing his views, so that we
shall often find in the earlier works a definite position, con-
fidently asserted, which later on, he tells us, he has been led
to abandon. And yet all the writings from the earliest to
the latest are the work of the same mind, and there is some-
thing fundamental which has not changed. Moreover, the
emphasis on logic and avoidance of speculative metaphysics
seem to have had the opposite effect to what might have
been expected. It makes understanding a more exacting and
relentless quest. We are sternly held back from playing with
broad explanatory world views. All that kind of thinking
is contemptuously dismissed.

What emerges and what alone is important for us in
Russell’s philosophy is his determination to apply to
philosophical problems the broad principles which have

13

proved successful in the study of scientific problems. This
will deliver us from the delusion that any philosophy can tell
us something about the universe as a whole—which science
never attempts to do. Philosophy has been corrupted by the
wishful thinking which demands a comprehensive under-
standing of everything, and this is still the unconscious pre-
mise of most metaphysical systems. ‘‘Reality,” says Bosan-
quet, ‘‘is not merely one and self-consistent, but it is a system
of reciprocally determinate parts.” Russell regards this as a
wholly unjustifiable assumption. The oneness of the world
“is merely the oneness of what is seen by a single spectator
or apprehended by a single mind”’.’ It is purely subjective.
There is no convincing reason for regarding the universe
as a rational and meaningful system.

Russell’s exhaustive and highly sceptical analysis of
philosophical problems makes considerable demands on his
readers, but his clarity and skill in presentation never desert
him and his most exacting discussions are illuminated by
flashes of wit and profound insight. It is difficult to make
up one’s mind whether Russell is an obscure philosopher
with frequent amazingly lucid intervals, or on the other
hand, a philosopher almost as clear as the profundity of his
problems permits. Yet the necessity of coming to terms with
his fundamental ideas cannot be evaded. They underlie
all that he has to say on questions of supreme importance
for mankind. They constitute the foundation of so much
that has found powerful and persuasive expression in many
fields of human life, foundations which cannot be allowed
to go unexamined.

This is not going to be quite such a difficult task as might
be supposed, if we can make our way through or around
those passages of argumentation comprehensible only to the
experts, and sometimes not even to them. Some of the more
tangled thickets have been cleared away by recent critical
work, and on other issues the obscurity has been found to be

* Tbid.
14

due not to profundity but error. Even where we are forced
to disagree we are still compelled to listen; because, as so
often in philosophy, the errors of the wise are more profit-
able than the truisms of the pedant.

It is not only the philosophy of Russell that must be sub-
jected to close scrutiny. The causes he has supported and
the remedies for the world’s ills that he has propounded can-
not all of them command our unquestioning assent. Some of
his pronouncements have indeed proved disastrous—notably
his pacifist propaganda during the Munich period, and his
advocacy of preventive atomic war against Russia in 1946.
And on many other issues, while we applaud his motives
and recognise his sincerity, we may find ourselves convinced
of the inadequacy of his diagnosis and the error of his
remedies. Yet here again, in the course of such a critical
examination of his opinions and of their rational and
irrational grounds, the permanent contribution of Russell’s
ideas clearly emerges by the side of recognisable error.

15

2

THE MAKING OF A PHILOSOPHER

In his Autobiography Russell tells us how at the age of
eleven he began the philosophical enquiries which he was
to pursue with pertinacity for the whole course of his
academic career. His brother Frank began at this time to
teach him Euclid. But as this branch of mathematics begins
with certain axioms, which are assumed and not proved,
Russell refused to accept them unless he could see good
reasons for doing so. He was never furnished with these
reasons, and many years later he knew that it was by no
means necessary to accept all Euclid’s axioms as self-evident
truths. At the age of eleven, however, since he could not go
on unless he accepted them, he had to do so. “The doubt
as to the premisses of mathematics which I felt at that
moment,” he says, “remained with me, and determined the
course of my subsequent work.” In fact from then until he was
thirty-eight mathematics was his chief source of happiness.

No doubt he was not the first intelligent boy to ask that
question. What was significant was that he went on asking
it and after twenty years’ hard thinking reached an answer
that opened the way to new conceptions of the laws of logic
and the function of reason. Even as a boy, and this be-
comes more manifest in his youth, he could never be satisfied
with a lack of sufficient grounds for any belief whatsoever.
He believed that as soon as it is held that any belief, no
matter what, is important for some other reason than that
it is true, a whole host of evils is ready to spring up.

16

This absorption in the basic principles of mathematics, the
most abstract of all enquiries, also indicates a profound in-
wardness and detachment from the coarse-fibred realities of
the world which characterised his whole mental life. It
appears in the surrender of his early intention to become
a physicist. “I was completely destitute of the concrete kinds
of skill which are necessary in science. Science was there-
fore closed to me as a career.” It may be thought that a
similar lack of the practical sense may also account for an
unrealistic approach to political and social problems, and a
somewhat arrogant perfectionism in his ethical demands.
Nevertheless these recondite studies proved to be of consider-
able importance and some effort must be made to under-
stand them.

In 1892 Russell was elected at Cambridge to ‘The
Society’ which outsiders, if they know of it, called ‘The
Apostles’. It consisted of a small group of some of the most
distinguished men in the university, including G. E. Moore,
J. M. E. McTaggart, Maynard Keynes, Lytton Strachey
and A. N. Whitehead. Their long, leisurely, informal discus-
sions resulted in a fertile interpenetration of ideas and of
enlightenment which greatly stimulated the minds of its
members. It was Whitehead who had read Russell’s
examination papers when he sat for his scholarship examina-
tion, and detected his ability and remarkable personality.
He at once introduced him to a circle of brilliant students
and the friendships that followed were permanent. White-
head was at that time generally regarded as a mathe-
matician; his Treatise on Universal Algebra had led to his
election to the Royal Society in 1903; but subsequently he
turned to philosophy and eventually at the age of sixty-three
became Professor of Philosophy at Harvard. During the first
ten years of Russell’s work at Cambridge in the fields of
logic and mathematics, Whitehead became his closest
associate and collaborator. They found themselves thinking
so much on the same lines that they joined forces to produce

B 17

the epoch-making work which laid the foundations of the
new philosophy. This was their Principia Mathematica.
The new approach to mathematics demanded rigour in
definitions and the rigorous proof of all theorems proceed-
ing from the axioms. These demands had already been ex-
pressed in the work of the great mathematicians who had
refined the theory of the calculus, and again in the develop-
ment of non-euclidian geometry, where Lobachevsky and
Reimann showed how by omitting Euclid’s axiom of par-
allels different geometries resulted. Russell attempted nothing
less than to dig down to the absolute foundations of all mathe-
matics, by the discovery of the irreducible concepts or “prim-
itive ideas’, and the rock-bottom set of indispensable axioms,
from which the whole body of mathematical theory could
be rigorously deduced. These he found, not in mathematics
at all as generally understood, but in logic. Together with
Whitehead, he attempted to show how, starting from certain
basic logical concepts, taken as primitive, self-understood
and indefinable, and a very few axioms of logic, it was
possible to deduce the whole of mathematics. Thus mathe-
matics became “a more highly developed form of logic”.
What was now wanted was a symbolic system which
would express both the logical processes on the one hand
and the mathematical processes on the other. This would
provide a kind of algebra of purely formal sequences of in-
ferences serving logical and mathematical requirements
simultaneously. Frege, the great German logician, had been
for long engaged on a similar project and so had the Italian
mathematician Peano. Russell and Whitehead worked with
incredible intensity on this problem, immensely stimulated
by these thinkers. “Suddenly,” says Russell, “in the space
of a few weeks, I discovered what appeared to be definitive
answers to the problems which had baffled me for years.”
Intellectually, he declares, it was the highest point of his
life. At one point in his work he tells us that he spent fruit-
less days completely frustrated, and felt likely to spend the

18

rest of his life looking at the blank sheet of paper on his
desk. But that particular problem too was solved, to his
satisfaction if not to that of later critics, and the work was
finished. It took nine years, and in the event altered the
whole conception of the relations of logic and mathematics,
and revolutionised philosophy. With the aid of the Royal
Society and the University Press it was published in 1910.
His intellect, he says, never quite recovered from the strain,
and ever since he has felt less capable of dealing with diffi-
cult abstractions. However he was soon engaged in the
application of the new methods of philosophical enquiry
to such questions as the nature of the physical world and
the nature of mind. No-one else was conscious of any flag-
ging of his philosophical powers.

What exactly was the significance of all this for
philosophy ? How did it portend a philosophical revolution ?
The important feature in Russell’s logical-mathematical
researches was the construction of definitions out of “‘primi-
tive ideas”. The concepts of mathematics, the concepts of
numbers and of the mathematical relations and properties
of numbers, were reduced to their simplest logical terms by
formulating exact definitions of them in terms of elemen-
tary logical ideas taken as primitive and self-evident. Such
mathematical entities as numbers were exhibited as “logical
constructions”. And when this was done, the most rigorous
proofs could be given of all theorems about them. This was,
in effect, a “logical analysis” of the concepts of mathematics;
and in terms of that analysis all the concepts could be made
clear, and rigorous proofs be offered, where formerly there was
too often obscurity and mere speculation and guesswork.

From the time of its publication, Principia Mathematica,
as its implications were realised, began to revolutionise not
only the understanding of logic and mathematics, but the
whole trend of philosophical thinking. Its relevance to
philosophy was at once apparent to Russell himself. In his
Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy (1919) he says:

19

“It deals with a body of knowledge which to those that
accept it appears to invalidate much traditional philosophy
and even a good deal of what is current in the present day.
In this way, as well as by its bearing on still unsolved prob-
lems, mathematical logic is relevant to philosophy.”

In philosophy too, the same kind of rigorous logical
analysis of concepts could hope to clear away confusion,
bringing clarity in place of obscurity; and if it did not solve
all the problems of philosophy, as they have tradition-
ally been understood, it would expose pretended solutions
which rested merely on imprecise formulations of concepts,
and would get rid of idle speculation.

What it was really doing, through the more precise use
of language and a strict regard for the real functions of
logic, was to show how many philosophical puzzles disappear
when the questions they seek to answer are properly framed,
or are by their very nature beyond the scope of the mind to
reason about.

This was to state in new and more sophisticated terms the
theme of those earlier empiricist thinkers who had concerned
themselves with the limits of the human understanding. It
had been the method of Ockham and later of Descartes. It
had appeared again in Locke and Hume and in Kant’s
Critique. What Russell was saying was what Hume, with a
less rigorous use of logic and knowledge of mathematical
theory, had said in his Enquiry Concerning Human Under-
standing in 1748:

“When we run over our libraries, persuaded of these prin-
ciples, what havoc must we make? If we take in our hand
any volume of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance;
let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning
quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental
reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No.
Commit it then to the flames for it can contain nothing
but sophistry and illusion.”

20

It was to terminate in the linguistic philosophy of Wittgen-
stein and Ayer, in the philosophy to end all philosophies.

It would be a mistake, however, to imagine that mathe-
matical-logic was the sole basis of Russell’s philosophy. The
emotional, the ethical, even the mystical, became for him
not something alien to reason, but rather the dialectical
counterpart to the thinking that leaves the affectional nature
without explanation or justification. He himself was well
aware of its reality and its power—but while he could never
deny its reality neither could he in any way vindicate its
authority. When he became aware of it, it swept through
him with compelling power: “Having for years cared only
for exactness and analysis, I found myself filled with semi-
mystical feelings about beauty, with an intense interest in
children, and with a desire almost as profound as that of
Buddha to find some philosophy which should make life
endurable.” This was to issue in the enthusiasm for moral
and social reform of the second Bertrand Russell, the
counter-philosophy which in the second half of his life
entirely took the place of the analytical passion of his earlier
years.

Russell had always been more sensitive to the spiritual over-
tones of life and above all to every kind of human suffering
than he usually allowed to appear. He effectually concealed
this by the crisp precision and penetration of his intellect
and the dry severity of his ruthless wit. This belied the real
man. He tells us how in 1906 he went to Newnham to hear
Gilbert Murray read his translation of the Hippolytus of
Euripides, which includes the great Hymn to Eros.

Eros, Eros, who blindest tear by tear

Men’s eyes with hunger, thou swift foe that pliest

Deep in our hearts joy like an edged spear;

Come not to me with evil haunting near

Wrath on the wind, nor jarring of the clear
Wing’s music as thou fliest.

21

There is no shaft that burneth, not in fire,

Not in wild stars, far off and flinging fear

As in thine hands the shafts of all desire.
Eros, Child of the highest.

He was profoundly moved by the beauty of the poetry. He
writes to Murray that year :

“Dear Gilbert,

I have now read the Hippolytus, and feel impelled to tell
you how much it has affected me. Those of us who love
poetry read the great masterpieces of modern literature be-
fore we have any experience of the passions they deal with.
To come across a new masterpiece with a more mature mind
is a wonderful experience and one which I have found
almost overwhelming.

TOUESENEE Bertrand Russell”

It was on the same occasion when on their return home
they found Mrs. Whitehead undergoing the agony of a
severe heart attack. He says: “She seemed cut off from
everyone and everything by walls of agony, and the sense
of solitude of each human soul suddenly overwhelmed me—
the loneliness of the human soul is unendurable; nothing
can penetrate it except the highest intensity of the sort of
love that religious teachers have preached.” He tells us that
the effect of this experience was to make of him “a com-
pletely different person”.

We find him then, in these days when his intellect was
stretched to its greatest intensity and his major creative
work was being done, more than a logician—a man who
could experience warm friendships and profound emotion.
Capable of the subtlest mathematics and most recondite
metaphysical thought, with a clarity which comes only to
a unique and single-minded passion for truth, a man
addicted to fields of thought that usually dry up the springs
of feeling, and yet warmed and illumined with pity, full of
an almost mystical tenderness for mankind.

22

3

THE ONE AND THE MANY

When Russell came up to Cambridge he became the friend
and pupil of the Hegelian philosopher McTaggart, whose
wit recommended the idealist philosophy which he taught.
He tells us’ how in 1894 while walking along Trinity Lane
he suddenly saw the truth of the famous ontological proof
of the existence of God. Already under the influence of
Plato, it is not surprising that the philosophy of Hegel
greatly attracted him. His tutor Stout and the Oxford
philosopher Bradley, whose Appearance and Reality had
just been published, were in these years the men who
directed the development of his thinking. He says of Brad-
ley that he read him with avidity and admired him more
than any other recent philosopher.

Russell himself in his Problems of Philosophy (1912) gives
a clear account of Bradley’s position, although by then he
had long since ceased to agree with it. He explains that
idealism of this kind held that all things are affected by
their relations with other things and with the wholes of
which they are the parts. A fish it what it is because it is
structurally and organically related to its watery environ-
ment. “Whatever has relations to things outside itself must
contain some reference to those outside things in its own
nature and could not therefore be what it is if those outside

39 2

things did not excite it”,” and were not related to it in the

* My Mental Development—in Schlipp, The Philosophy of Bertrand
Russell.
? The Problems of Philosophy.

23

special ways proper to the whole system of which they are
all constituent parts. Thus a thing is not merely something
having its own self-possessed characteristics but is actually
constituted by its relations to other things.

Bradley held that anything taken in a limited fashion,
ignoring the more distant connections it has, is not truly
known. The finite is less than completely real, but to proceed
to the apprehension of all its relations we cannot stop short
of the universe. “The world is a single, indivisible whole,
the attempted isolation of any element in which involves
distortion and partial falsehood. There are no self-contained
facts short of Reality as a whole—the Absolute.”*® Any other
view lands one in contradiction.

This was the view more simply stated by Pope in his
Essay on Man:

All are but parts of one stupendous whole,

Whose body nature is, and God the soul.

All nature is but art, unknown to thee;

All chance direction, which thou canst not see;
All discord harmony not understood;

All partial evil, universal good :

And, spite of pride, in erring reason’s spite,

One truth is clear, whatever is, is right.

Pope’s optimistic conclusion was put again, less poetically
but more philosophically, by the American idealist, Josiah
Royce, who concludes his exposition of the rationality of
the universe (properly seen sub specie aeternitas) by demon-
strating that “the very presence of evil in the temporal order
is the condition of the perfection of the eternal order”.

There is an interesting letter from Bradley, which he
wrote to Russell in the first month of 1914:

“I think I understand what you say as to the way in which
to philosophize. I imagine that it is the right way and that
its promises are never illusions, though they may not be kept
*Urmson, Philosophical Analysis.
24

to the letter. There is something perhaps in the whole of
things that one feels is wanting when one considers the
doctrines before one, and (as happens elsewhere) one feels
that one knows what one wants and that what one wants is
there—if only one could find it. And for my part I believe
that one does find it more or less. And yet still I must believe
that one never does or can find the whole in all its aspects,
and that there never after all will be a philosopher who did
not reach his truth, after all, except by some partiality and
one-sidedness—and that, far from mattering, this is the right
and the only way. This is however only faith and I could
not offer to prove it. I am sure that in my own work, such as
it is, I have illustrated the partiality—if nothing else.”

This is a modest and kindly letter from one of the Augus-
tans to a challenging newcomer.

In these apparently simple words lies the heart of the
idealist philosophy—the desire to find that what we believe
is already there, the rationality so sadly missing in the experi-
enced world. Behind the partiality and incompleteness is
something implied in and even guaranteed by our very sense
of failure, by our hunger for the truth we cannot find. For
Bradley this philosophy became the faith that the very con-
ception of rationality implied a rational universe. The prin-
ciple of unification behind all our mental activity demands
an extension to include everything. We are working in the
light of a principle of which the Absolute Unity is the full
expression. The knowledge of our finitude, our contradic-
tions, our imperfections, implies that we are already under
the influence of the infinite the rational and the perfect.

However much this may have attracted Russell in his
early years at Cambridge, and it certainly did, he very
quickly emancipated himself from it as exalting wishful
thinking into a metaphysic. It is a strange philosophy that
can assert belief in the goodness and rationality of the uni-
verse, not on the basis of evidence to that effect, but regard-
less of it, so that its truth is consistent with any state of

25

affairs, with any facts whatsoever, and is not only able to re-
concile itself with experiences which contradict it, but actu-
ally draw substance from them. With such a faith one can
indeed gather patience while the world is sad. It represents
the triumph of speculative thought over the tragedies of life.

After taking his degree in 1894 Russell went down, but
in 1895 he was made a Fellow of Trinity College and re-
turned to Cambridge. Strongly influenced by Moore’s
Refutation of Idealism (1903) he found himself increasingly
sceptical of philosophers who tried to prove that the universe
was really exactly what they wanted it to be. He repudiated
every impulse to substitute wishes for facts, or otherwise
to make ourselves the centre of importance in the universe.
He was chary of all optimistic intimacy with the Absolute,
and insisted on the necessity of careful, unbiassed and un-
shrinking analysis as the only way to get to the reality of
things. Facts have to be accepted as ultimate whether agree-
able or not. There is to be no leaping over them to reassur-
ing beliefs which explain them away.

Russell saw such philosophical speculation as more the
product of the needs and wishes of metaphysicians than the
conclusion of impartial investigation. Philosophers had
allowed their opinions to be influenced by the desire for
edification.* ‘Knowing, as they supposed,” he says, “what
beliefs would make men virtuous they have invented argu-
ments, often very sophistical, to prove that these beliefs are
true. For my part I reprobate this kind of bias, both on
moral and intellectual grounds.” He questioned with in-
creasing scepticism all theories which treated the world of
experience as illusory and misleading while they sought for
a deeper truth hidden from us. Was there any deeper truth?
Why not accept the facts as they are and tackle our prob-
lems one by one, as we do in science?

“Though Hegel must not be included among them, for he roundly

condemned this influence on philosophical thinking. Russel] never
gave him credit for this.

26

Russell directed his attack first on the logic of idealist
metaphysics. Bradley had argued that every attempt at
stating truth is inevitably defective, partial and less than
the truth. But if no partial truth is true, this must apply
to the “truths” which embody the idealist philosophy. But
if these are defective and partial, any deduction we make
from them may be vitiated by the falsity of the premises.
“In order to prove that there can be only one coherent
whole, the theory is compelled to appeal to experience,
which must consist in knowing particular truth, and thus
requires a notion of truth that the monistic theory cannot
admit.”®

He proceeded to criticise the view that we cannot know
any particular thing apart from the total system of related
things making up the whole of which it is a part. Russell
thought that, applied to society, this meant subordinating
the individual to an abstraction, the State. He also rejected
on logical grounds the whole idealist doctrine of relations
which denied that you could know anything in itself. He
believed that a thing could have properties not involving
any other thing; or it might have other properties or quali-
ties involving only one other thing—such a property is
“being married”. From the properties thus really belonging
to a thing nothing can be deduced by pure logic, as the
idealist believed, as to the infinite network of relations which
are supposed to constitute it. This, Russell held, was a
fundamental logical error, and from it the whole imposing
edifice arose. But he knew well enough the attraction of the
theory, its profound effects in politics and social theory,
and in ethics. He concluded his criticisms by pointing out
that the collapse of the Hegelian philosophy “illustrates an
important truth, namely, that the worse your logic, the more
interesting the consequences to which it gives rise”’.®

What followed from these arguments was, firstly, the

* Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 1906.
* Problems of Philosophy.

27

validity of direct factual knowledge: there could be true
facts, for these were no longer dissolved in an endless system
of relationships; and secondly, that knowledge of separate
facts was possible because one does not find truth only in
knowledge of the whole of which the facts are a part. The
separate facts have their own identity, their own properties,
and our knowledge of them as such is true knowledge.

Russell’s process of analysis strips off the surface com-
plexities of the world so as to arrive at “the last residue”
analysis. This is much deeper than common sense, for the
ultimate facts require a good deal of stripping and probing
before we can see them clearly and state what exactly they
are. Anyone who takes the trouble to study the inquiries
of an analytical philosopher will be surprised at the rigorous
character of the argument, and the unfamiliar nature of his
findings.

By this road Russell arrived at his ultimate conception
of the universe : the world is composed of an infinite number
of separate entities. These entities are independent; they
do not, as the idealist logicians thought, so affect one an-
other that a thing is altered by its connection with or depend-
ence on other things, and especially by the process of being
known (so that we never know the thing as it is in itself);
things cannot interact to the extent of determining one-
another’s properties. It follows that the idealist is wrong
when he says that since things are understood in relation to
the organised wholes of which they are a part, knowledge
of any one thing, to be complete, must proceed by stages to
the knowledge of the whole, which is the One, the rational
Absolute, and the very ultimate reality.

Russell rejects this One (belief in which may be called
monism), for the ultimate reality of the Many (which is
called pluralism). The world is composed of an infinite num-
ber of mutually independent entities, with relations which
are simple and neither change the character of the things
related nor lead us irresistibly to a deeper reality of which

28

the appearances we know as facts are as it were merely
adjectives qualifying the whole. Each separate fact can be
stated separately in an “atomic proposition” (a proposition
which states simply: “This thing has this property” or
“These things are related by this relation”). And so Russell
concludes :

“The most fundamental of my intellectual beliefs is that
the idea that the world is a unity is rubbish. I think the
universe is all spots and jumps, without unity, and without
continuity, without coherence or orderliness, or any of the
other properties that governesses love.”

Once you were in possession of atomic propositions the
new logic, with its vastly improved methods of inference
compared with that of traditional logic, could give you all
the truth it is possible to have on the basis of the ultimate
data you are working with. Such knowledge will certainly
not proceed beyond the “logical constructions” of science
and the discourse and reasoning by which we describe the
world and our behaviour in it. It will never take us beyond
the world of experience. The metaphysical speculations of
the idealists are not obtainable by the logic which deals
with facts. We are therefore compelled to exclude all infer-
ences concerning extra-sensory realities, and all arguments
attempting to show what must be the nature of the hidden
reality which is responsible for the world of appearances.
There is no beyond. There is nothing hidden. Metaphysics
is banished from philosophy.

Not quite, of course, for Russell’s logical atomism is itself
a metaphysical theory—a fact which Russell never denied,
though many of his positivist followers have not realised
this. Russell was propounding a doctrine which tells us
what ultimately exists; and it actually proceeds in its own
exposition far beyond the rigid inference of the logical system
he has devised. Behind this somewhat perplexing circum-
stance lies a question which was to cause serious trouble to

29

his pupil and follower Wittgenstein, who had declared that
a proposition can have meaning only if it makes a statement
(true or false) of verifiable fact. But the proposition which
states this does not itself state a fact. It says something
about “‘the relations between facts and propositions” which
is not itself a fact. Therefore “the relation of language to
fact” cannot be a topic of significant discourse.

Russell had begun his career by believing in the possi-
bility of proving by metaphysics certain things about the
universe that religious feeling made him think important.
It was on these grounds that he decided to devote his life
to philosophy. But he came to see traditional philosophy
as occupying an unsatisfactory position, lying, as it does,
between theology with its authoritarian claims to revelation,
and science with its appeal to experience and reason. Its
own province appeared to him to be a region of speculation
in which there was no way to ascertainable knowledge.

Under the influence of Moore he moved away from
philosophical idealism to empiricism—to the world of the
irreducible facts of experience. Moore took the lead in
rebellion, and Russell followed, with a sense of emancipa-
tion. Bradley had argued that everything that common
sense believes is mere appearance; Moore and Russell re-
verted to the opposite extreme—that everything is real
that common sense, uninfluenced by philosophy and
theology, supposes real. Russell thus became what is known
as a “realist”.

Realism is a temper of mind more than a system of
philosophy. It represents a disposition to keep ourselves and
our preferences out of our judgment of things, letting the
facts speak for themselves. Instead of reading our hopes
and yearnings into the universe it allows every object its
right to exist and to challenge those hopes. It is prepared
to depersonalise the world, to see things starkly and factually
in a spirit which it conceives to be at once more objective
and more scientific than that of idealism.

30

While idealism attempts to describe the whole of things
from one centre, and to relate all the facts and all experience
into a rational system, to the realistic eye the joints of the
world are loosened. Plain observation sees the world not
as one thing but as many things of many kinds. And while
it is true that science shows things to be connected in various
ways, there is a radical difference between connection and
unification. The human wish for unity is highly suspect and
all but certain if it is given its head to falsify the facts. It
is the virtue of Russell’s analysis to be entirely honest in this
respect, to refuse to believe that there is some higher way
of knowing, to follow the path of basing beliefs upon obser-
vations as impersonal and as much divested of local and
temporal bias as is possible for human beings. Its conclusions
are not intended to have any emotional or religious or moral
implications whatever.

Here lies Russell’s real challenge to that kind of philosophy
which, in the hands of the great masters of speculation, has
sought to elicit from all the resources of our experience a
synthetic vision of the whole which would justify that con-
fidence in the world which has been the fruit of philosophy
at its best. The confession that reason is impotent to find
such meaning or value in the darkly mysterious aspects of
the actual world is regarded by many as a profoundly
pessimistic view. No civilisation, it has been said, has ever
maintained itself on so negative a foundation. A society
cannot maintain its social cohesion unless a decisive major-
ity of its members hold in common a number of guiding
ideas and ideals. Whitehead would agree, and adds his
warning : “Mankind can flourish on the lower stages of life
with merely barbarian flashes of thought. But when civilisa-
tion culminates, the absence of a co-ordinating philosophy
of life, spread through the community, spells decadence,
boredom, and the slackening of effort.”"

But the rejection of a complete and final theory of exis-

‘Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas.

31

tence does not deprive us of all guidance. If we cannot
have a total explanation that does not necessarily mean that
we are left entirely destitute. We are rightly warned that
throughout its history philosophy has been the particular
stronghold of verbal magic. By purely verbal means it has
tried to explain things which only science or scientific
sociology could explain or which cannot be explained at
all. It has created perplexities which are purely logical
puzzles, or has concerned itself with pseudo-problems and
bogus answers. But if we can reconcile ourselves to some-
thing very much less than certainty about something very
much less than the universe, we may find that we have light
enough to live by, if not to illuminate all possible problems.

The new race of philosophers that has followed Russell
is prepared to tolerate a considerable degree of uncertainty.
The quest for certainty may lead to emotionally soothing
or edifying results, but the acceptance of total explanations
may manifest a not fully liberated, pre-scientific type of
mind. A completely grown-up mind will have to shoulder
the responsibility for working with partial truths and do
without “ultimate”, “absolute”, “metaphysical” explana-
tions. Emotional immaturity often expresses itself in a dog-
matic attitude. It is a sign of maturity to be able to live
with an unfinished world-view.

32

ee

4

FOUNDATIONS

Russell’s first step in formulating his philosophy was the
reduction of the world to a multitude of separate facts. These
we know—we know them in so far as we directly experience
or are aware of them as facts given to us through our senses.
We name the objects which constitute elements of the facts
by attaching words or labels to them; and we then talk about
the world by asserting atomic propositions, i.e. by asserting
that certain things have certain qualities and stand in cer-
tain relations to each other. ‘These can be handled logically,
and combined, reasoned about and made intelligible by
using the rules of the new logic. What is then important
for Russell’s analysis is that it locates the ultimate reality
in the unit statements of a logical system. This and this
alone is a faithful picture of reality. To keep to reality, every
proposition must be made to refer to objects empirically
given, objects we are directly acquainted with in our sensu-
ous experience, and must simply say how they are arranged
to constitute facts. It must say only that certain observ-
able things exhibit certain observable qualities or stand in
certain observable relations. Any propositions which pre-
tend to tell us anything above or beyond this must be
eliminated.

The immense success of the new logic, its flexibility, its
range, i.e. its resources, encouraged Russell to look for re-
markable results if it could be transferred from the field
of pure logic to the world of facts. It had proved a great

c 33

success in mathematics: why not apply it to all discourse,
and to the problems of philosophy ?

We require to discipline our statements of belief, to purge
and improve our language, so as to ensure that nothing
is to be asserted except statements corresponding to the basic
formulas of logic and at the same time comprehending the
facts of the world. This language, working strictly in the
manner determined by the logical basis and its rules, can
express everything that can rationally be said about the
world. The rules of rational or logical discourse (thinking or
speaking or arguing) in such a language are of course those
of the new logic, and applied to language give us what is
called a logical syntax or grammar. Anything said which
is not in conformity with the syntax is ungrammatical, and
in logic false or meaningless. Russell believed that this would
show that a great range of alleged truths, theories, specula-
tions, explanations cannot be expressed logically (gram-
matically) and must therefore be rejected. Thus thought
and speech are purged of an immense amount of nonsense,
including a great deal of what has hitherto passed as rational
philosophising, profound metaphysical questions, speculative
explanations, and religious thinking. This, of course, was the
whole purpose of the exercise—to eliminate what cannot
really be thought or said at all, thus applying his own basic
principle of working with the smallest set of assumptions
possible, and getting rid of everything else. This only be-
comes possible if we have discovered what language really
is and related it to reality.

Russell’s analytical method had a profound effect on a
young Austrian who came to Trinity College, Cambridge
in 1912. Wittgenstein’s conclusion, which carried him be-
yond Russell’s own position, was embodied in a revolution-
ary philosophical work, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
(1921), which made a considerable impact upon a circle
of philosophers mainly interested in the basic theories of
science, known as the Vienna Circle. Here analysis took

34

a trend in the direction of developing the logic of scientific
method, known as Logical Positivism, which accepted
Russell’s view and that of the Tractatus that valid scientific
statements must be based on empirical observations. They
rejected all other statements as metaphysical. They
demanded factual verification for every statement made,
holding that for a belief to have any meaning it must be
in principle capable of being tested by observation and
experiment. Analysis, for them, becomes the method of stat-
ing the criteria for distinguishing meaningful statements
from the multitude of unverifiable claims and propositions.

This raised a number of vital questions concerning the
reality of non-observable entities like electrons, and of the
inductive process by which scientists arrived at explanatory
theories. Russell himself devoted a great deal of thought
to this problem of induction and came to the conclusion
that inductive knowledge cannot validly give us any general
law or explanatory theory, unless based on certain postulates.

This was as far as Russell could go in solving the riddle
so disturbingly propounded by Hume, which showed the
impossibility of inferring from no matter how many in-
stances of one phenomenon following another that they are
causally connected and so can be taken as demonstrating
a scientific law. Hume asserted that no general law could be
reached from sense data by logical induction. Russell agreed
with him: “We all know that these rather crude expecta-
tions of uniformity are liable to be misleading. The man
who has fed the chicken every day throughout its life at last
wrings its neck instead, showing that a more refined view
as to the uniformity of nature would have been useful to
the chicken.”*

Russell confined absolute certainty to abstract logical and
mathematical inferences, to tautologies, in which the con-
clusion is already contained in the premises. In so far as
your logical symbols stand for atomic facts you can use

* Problems of Philosophy.
35

your computer to find out what is entailed by them, but this
can never raise you above the level of the field of observed
facts. There is no logical process to give you general laws
or explanatory theories.

The only strictly logical and mathematically certain
world for Russell, therefore, was “the world taken to be of
identical structure with, and to be perfectly represented by,
a language with the structure of the mathematico-logical
symbolic system of the Principia Mathematica.’ And its
grammar, or logical laws, are the only guide we have as to
the structure and meaning of reality.

Russell was aware (though he was forced to make a few
concessions) that such a world could only consist of observed
facts, labelled with the symbols of his logical notation. His
system could give him no information beyond the facts
themselves and what they entailed. Such a world was desti-
tute on his own showing of law and explanation.

This is the last word in Russell’s exposition of logical
analysis. It is a miracle of logical consistency and has got
rid of a great deal, in accordance with his basic principle
of operating with the minimum of assumptions. But what it
gains in consistency it loses in credibility. It falls far short
of the measure of scientific truth obtained by scientists and
of the range of rational enquiry covered by many other
departments of knowledge such as history, psychology and
anthropology. It was above all a world destitute of law and
offering no data from which logically to infer any explan-
atory theory, which Russell could only reach by an act of
faith, by postulating the principles of induction he could
not rationally justify. If these are the foundations of Russell’s
philosophy, there are certainly some loose stones in it.

Russell’s Commitment
Russell can only escape from what he saw as the failure
of inductive logic by an act of faith, by commitment. Declar-
*Urmson, Philosophical Analysis.

36

ing that the problem of inductive inference remains un-
solved, Russell proceeds to assume the truth of what he can-
not prove by framing a series of postulates on the basis of
which the probability of a scientific generalisation can be
presumed.

This is to base science ultimately on an act of faith in
scientific reason—an argument welcomed by those religious
persons who find in it a rational excuse for their own act of
faith.

The trouble is that if he adopts this way out of the
difficulty, the scientist has put himself in the position of
being unable to challenge the faith of the mystic. By assert-
ing that even science makes an ultimately irrational com-
mitment the man of religious faith avoids his loss of in-
tellectual integrity.

Very much the same kind of escape route has been
offered by A. J. Ayer. With Russell he refutes the uncritical
view that “we think ourselves entitled to treat the instances
which we have been able to examine as reliable guides to
those we have not. But, as Hume pointed out, this assump-
tion is not demonstrable.”* Nor can the difficulty be sur-
mounted by “basing our assessments of the probability of
hypotheses on an a priori theory of probability. .. . I do not
see how from a purely formal calculus it is possible to derive
any conclusion at all about what is likely to happen.’’* Ayer
rejects all attempts to solve the problem of induction by try-
ing to fit inductive arguments into a deductive mould. He
concludes that we must assume the correctness of induction
and justify the process as rational by its general acceptability
in practice. The inductive process is not justified by reason,
“it goes to set the standard of rationality.”*

What this means is that since we cannot justify induction
rationally we close the gap by choosing another criterion
of rationality than logic or scientific inference.

* Ayer, The Problem of Knowledge. ‘Ibid.
* Ayer, The Problem of Knowledge.
37

The danger of this procedure is that if we make our
criterion of rationality a matter of choice, our attention is
shifted from the idea of truth to the motive for belief, which
is pure pragmatism. Surely this, far from helping us to an
easier way to accept certain desirable “truths”, is better
seen as an explanation of why people come to believe what
isn’t true. It is an invitation to open the mind to any theory.
It provides no rational obstacle to more willing believers
in the supernatural than Ayer, no immunity against
delusion, credulity and wishful thinking.

Are we then compelled to grant that there is no rational
justification for regarding any of the laws of science as even
approximately true? Must they be regarded as merely use-
ful fictions or operational instructions, or else be blindly
accepted by an act of faith?

Fortunately there is a more satisfactory way of dealing
with this difficulty which has been proposed by Karl Popper
and has secured wide support among scientists.

Popper abandoned altogether the attempt to justify in-
duction logically, as misguided and involving one inevitably
in an infinite regress in the search for certainty. He directed
attention to the importance of methods, not of establishing,
but of refuting or falsifying general laws and explanatory
theories. A well-formulated scientific law or theory is always
consistent with the observations on which it has been based—
but it must also be so formulated as to make clear what sort
of facts would be inconsistent with it, i.e. what future
observations would falsify it. Theories are tested by making
every effort by systematic observation and experiment, to
falsify them. And they can be regarded as established so far,
and only so far, as they have remained unfalsified. This
procedure of testing theories by efforts to falsify them can
never reach any absolute certainty as regards the truth of
any theory. But scientists do not require in establishing a
law or theory the certainty that is proper to mathematical
deduction. Deduction of that kind is indispensable within

38

science, but its laws and theories are not reached by any
such process. And science does very well with the relative
truth of hypotheses that have been pretty thoroughly tested
and up to a point verified, even though this falls short of
absolute finality. This means of course that all such theories
are open to revision, modification and sometimes to com-
plete reformulation.

Popper’s approach to the problem is based on the fact
that no matter how many instances we can find that are
consistent with the law or theory under discussion, they
do not conclusively verify it; but one case inconsistent with
the law refutes it. If, therefore, you frame a hypothesis
which recognises and states what facts would refute it, and
then test it and find that nothing happens to refute it, it
begins to look like truth. Theories cannot be completely veri-
fied, but they can be falsified by a single negative instance.
The more possible cases there are where a statement could
be refuted by the evidence, but in fact isn’t, the more reason
do we have to treat it as possessing a useful degree of truth.

Now the method thus pursued is clearly an example of
what Russell means by analysis, as a method of stating the
criteria for distinguishing valid statements from the multi-
tude of unverifiable claims. It clearly defines the irreducible
and final type of proposition which contains knowledge of
actuality. ;

Knowledge is now seen not as a set of general laws arrived
at by inductive inference, simply by generalising from
observation, but as a matter of actively proposing theories
for the purpose of testing them, making conjectures and try-
ing all ways to find out if facts falsify them. It is a matter
of putting imaginative questions to the world and energeti-
cally seeking a negative answer.

Wittgenstein’s Second Theory
Wittingenstein himself was largely responsible for the
logical positivism of the Vienna Circle, who thus came to

39

concern themselves primarily with verification and held
that what could not be verified by observation must be re-
jected as metaphysical. But he grew profoundly dissatisfied
with his own position as expounded in the Tractatus, for
what he had written there now appeared to him to fall under
the condemnation of all statements which cannot be verified
by reference to observed facts. One cannot say anything about
“the agreement of a proposition with reality”, for any
propositions which attempt to say what this agreement is
are not in themselves statements of empirical fact. The
formula which states the criterion of what is a meaningful
statement is thus not itself a verifiable proposition.

Wittgenstein proceeded to develop an entirely new kind
of analysis, which became known as linguistic analysis. Like
Russell and the Vienna positivists, he found no sense in
propositions or even problems of a philosophical sort; but
he no longer concerned himself with problems about how
meaningful language can be made to conform to a world
of facts. He concerned himself only with language, regard-
ing any question about the relation of language to the reality
which it describes as unnecessary and unphilosophical. Thus
philosophy changes its role. It does not answer philosophical
problems, it removes them from the agenda. If we use
words correctly and not metaphysically nor in other ways
which give rise to fictitious problems, we can get along per-
fectly well. There is nothing for philosophy to reveal. It
“Jeaves everything as it is.” Its only task is to cure the
mental cramp of minds that have got stuck owing to bad
grammar (illogical grammar).

This is a very long way from Bertrand Russell, who dis-
approved of this final stage of the Analytical method as
Wittgenstein and the linguistic philosophers had developed it.

He says:

“The new philosophy seems to me to have abandoned, with-

out necessity, that grave and important task which philo-

* Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations.

40

ae

sophical thought has hitherto pursued. I cannot feel that
the new philosophy is carrying on this tradition. The only
reason that I can imagine for the restriction of philosophy
to such triviality is the desire to separate it sharply from
empirical science. I do not think such a separation can be
usefully made.

A philosophy which is to have any value should be built
upon a wide and firm foundation of knowledge that is not
specifically philosophical. Such knowledge is the soil from
which the tree of philosophy derives its vigour. Philosophy
cannot be fruitful if divorced from empirical science. . .
Science has presented us with a new world, new concepts and
new methods, not known in earlier times, but proved by
experience, fruitful where the older concepts and methods
proved barren.’”?

The new philosophy, Russell feels, is remote from life’s
problems, and devotes its professional skill to removing
muddles which no-one but academic philosophers bother
about. Philosophers, in fact, are now doing nothing more
than clear up the muddles of other philosophers. Russell
wants something better than this, a return to the task of
answering the problems which Linguistic Analysis has dis-
missed.

* My Philosophical Development.

41

5

SOME LOOSE STONES

Russell, as we have seen, conscientiously and assiduously
pursued the task of stripping off layer after layer of com-
plexities and excrescences to discover the ultimate realities.

What are these ultimates? We can only find them by
analysing our statements about physical objects, such as
tables and chairs, horses and men, to find out the simple
irreducible atomic facts to which we are really referring,
though we are not aware of it. These ultimate facts are the
facts of sensation of which we are aware when we talk of
seeing or touching physical objects such as a table, and our
awareness of these sensations leads us to conclusions about
tables and the like. The ultimate constituents of the ultimate
facts are thus sense data. Physical objects are nothing but
“logical constructions” from these sense data. With a care-
fully constructed language corresponding to these ultimates
everything that is the case, the whole truth about the world,
is expressible in a series of atomic propositions.

Behind this quest for reality is a passionate desire for
simplicity, for the reduction of complexity to simple funda-
mentals. Russell rejoices in the satisfaction of creating and
contemplating the realm of well-ordered, distinct and stable
logical entities, in contrast with the confused world of every-
day experience. Logical ideas possess an aloofness from the
concrete change and hurly-burly of life, which gives them
a clarity and precision satisfying to the intellectual demands
of the philosopher.

But the ultimate he eventually reaches is very far from

42

concrete reality; it is a much over-simplified view of the
world. No experience and no science has ever given us
grounds for accepting such elements of permanent and
enduring reality, such self-subsistent, self-caused, permanent
units of being. Nor do the disconnected atomic facts, each
reflected by an atomic proposition, bear any resemblance
to the dynamic flow and interpenetration of processes which
we find in the world.

Remembering Ockham’s Razor, we can imagine Russell
paring down and stripping and lopping, an endless peeling
of the onion to find the real onion somewhere inside. It is
a special type of philosophical investigation of the “nothing
but” kind. Music consists of vibrations of ascertainable
frequencies; it is “nothing but” sequences of physical vibra-
tions which can be exactly expressed in numerical form.
To get at the real man, isolate him from his house, his car,
his wife and family, his friends. Strip off his clothes—is this
the real man? No. Strip off skin and flesh, eviscerate him
until you reach at last the skeleton. The man at last! As the
little boy defined it—‘‘man with all his outside taken off
and all his inside taken out.”

This kind of analysis, we begin to realise, leaves everything
of significance out of account. Yet it cannot be entirely re-
jected. It goes with a ruthless examination of all that passes
for reality, seeking to distinguish the essential from the un-
essential, from the superficial which misleads and confuses,
from the unreal. And surely this is one of the permanent
tasks of critical thinking.

In Russell’s philosophy we recognise from time to time the
value of stripping off the unverifiable and illusory, but when
this leads to the fallacy of mistaking abstractions reached
only by the intellect for the whole known to experience and
not merely known but continuously lived by, we are aware
of an intellectualism that is not in the least rational. The
whole truth of the world cannot be expressed in “atomic
propositions”.

43

Russell adopted a philosophical position known as
“realism”, which meant in effect that he insisted that all
our statements, true or false, refer to a real world of fact
which exists independently of any of our thoughts, and that
the truth or falsity of what we think is determined by what is
or is not the case in the real world, depending in no way
on our thoughts themselves.

So far, so good. But in terms of his “logical analysis”
Russell tried to arrive at the ultimate constituents of the
real world, the ultimate and irreducible facts—and so, like
many who had gone before, arrived at an account of the
world in which we hardly recognise it as we know it and
believe it to be in ordinary experience. And like them, he
came up against an irreconcilable contradiction between his
theoretical constructions of the facts, and the facts as we
actually experience them; between his metaphysical idea
of the world deduced by pure logical reasoning (or what he
took to be such) and our ideas of the world as arrived at in
real life.

As a man of common sense and a disciple of the sciences,
Russell wanted to say that the material world of tables,
chairs and men, of stars and atoms, exists; and that we
know and can find out a lot about it. As a philosopher, on
the other hand, he reduces this world to nothing but a bare
framework of ‘“‘atomic facts”, and its constituents to nothing
but “sense data”. But if such is “the real world”, what truth
can there be in our everyday beliefs about it, or in the
theories worked out by the sciences? And what validity can
be found in the actual means and methods by which in
practice we obtain for ourselves what we always take to be
knowledge ?

Russell’s ‘‘realism’’, his insistence that whatever we find
to be the ultimate constituents of known facts must be the
real things, led him to the logical conclusion that the ultim-
ate constituents of reality include not only particular things
but also “universals”. If it is a fact that “this rose is red”,

44

then the universal quality denoted by the word “red” is as
much a constituent of the fact and a real thing as is “this
rose”. Universals like “Redness” may not exist like par-
ticular things in space and time, but they are none the less
real.

This brings Russell back to the Platonism’ of his earlier
years and also links him with the American “realists”
(1912).

They all held that “universals” had an absolutely real
existence (or subsistence) and were not merely ideas in our
mind, but objects of thought. Russell would have no truck
with the subjective idealism that believes that to have an
idea of something is to know only “the idea in our mind”.
In his Problems of Philosophy he firmly establishes his
realism over against this subjective idealism. He insists that
“the faculty of being acquainted with things other than
itself is the main characteristic of a mind”. If we are think-
ing of whiteness, it is “in our mind” only in the sense
that we are thinking of whiteness; whiteness itself is not
in our mind.

Russell also believed that while we have no direct know-
ledge of physical objects, but only of sense data, we “‘in-
stinctively” believe in them, and also in the existence of
other minds. Common sense and science transcend the
data of direct experience, creating elaborate super-structures
whose validity we accept without question. We do trans-
cend the data, and we cannot help transcending them.
Russell is fully aware of this. He believes that ‘All know-
ledge must be built upon our instinctive beliefs, and if these
are rejected, there is nothing left”;’ and that “There can

*For Plato “ideas”—that is to say general ideas—are the universal
prototypes of (defective) particular things. They are real, which implies
that they have an eternal and changeless being and are independent
not only of the material things in which they appear, but also of any
mind which thinks them. (This became the “Realist” philosophy of
medieval thought.)

* Problems of Philosophy.

45

—— ee

never be any reason for rejecting one instinctive belief except
that it clashes with others; so that if they are found to har-
monise, the whole system becomes worthy of acceptance.’”®
Yet Russell’s basic principle was to cut down the number
of admissible beliefs to the point where they almost vanish.

It would now appear that having set in motion a process
of analysis which threw everything out of the front door,
one by one they return through the back, but in the strange
guise of instinctive beliefs, subsistent entities, and postulates
of inductive inference. We are back where we started from,
with one important difference, that all these entities,
now recognised as indispensable, are accepted purely in
faith. A strange ending to a process of ruthless rational
analysis.

This became very clear when Russell tackled the ques-
tion of the validity of general laws. Hume had demonstrated
that you cannot by a process of logical inference pass from
a number of facts—however many you may assemble—to
a general law. Recognising this, logicians had suggested that
we might assume the uniformity of nature and then a
number of similar facts might be taken to indicate a general
law. This was generally regarded as unsatisfactory. Russell
agreed with Hume; he could not see how, if logic is con-
cerned with the necessary implications of facts and valid
inferences from them, you can reach general laws, unobserv-
able entities like electrons, or far-reaching physical theories.
The point is a good one, he was not mistaken. You cannot
by any process of valid inference known to formal logic
infer from any facts a truth that is not already stated, even
if not obviously stated. Neither logic nor a computer can do
more than sort out your facts, arrange them, extract the
relevant information from them, bring together related facts,
extract what is actually implicit in them. But all this falls
short of establishing a general law or inferring an explana-
tory theory. Hume had long ago seen this and had denied the

° Ibid.
46

validity of all inferences going beyond facts to laws. Laws
were our expectations, and had a psychological not a logical
explanation.

Russell takes up the question again and again. In 1943
he declares that “the problem of inductive inference is still
unsolved”; in Human Knowledge—its Scope and Limits
(1948) he points out that the principle of induction by
means of which we pass from particular cases to a general
law cannot be claimed as self-evidently valid. Because of
this, reasoning in accordance with such a principle has
occupied “a very peculiar position in most accounts of
scientific inference; it has been considered to be, like the
hangman, necessary but unpleasant, and not to be talked of
if the subject could possibly be avoided”.

Russell is finally reduced to assuming the truth of the
general principle of induction; because he needs it to satisfy
the need for justifying the process of reaching general laws.

This is unsatisfactory because, as was already remarked
in Chapter 4, if the rationalist ultimately bases his rational
procedures on an act of commitment which has no rational
ground, the irrationalist who does the same has a rational
excuse for his irrationalism. He can now make any claim
to truth that he needs without losing intellectual integrity.
Thus the scientist who bases his logical method on an act
of faith cannot criticise the holder of a different commit-
ment, who accepts the miraculous, or the creative fiat of
the Deity, or whatever.

It must not be supposed that when logical atomism as a
system, or a metaphysic even, became involved in more
difficulties than advantages, Russell’s philosophy collapsed.
In the first place, Russell knew the difficulties better than
his critics and derived a painful pleasure in wrestling with
them. In the second place, Russell never produced a Russell-
ian Philosophy. He advanced one after the other a whole
series of philosophies which were seldom consistent with
one another. As his thinking developed he moved from one

47

subject to an allied but different subject and to quite new
problems. So that if Russell was the high priest of Logical
Atomism, he was also the arch-heretic.

The Problem of Knowing

Russell was always aware of the deeper problems below
the case he was arguing, and often saw the difficulties more
clearly than many of his critics. “It is a wonderful and
admirable thing about Russell how candidly and exhaus-
tively he would raise difficulties about the views he had
fathered. His distaste for infanticide would never prevail
against his hatred of error.’”* This was so through the whole
of the creative period of his philosophical writing. He fre-
quently expounded a position; felt its defects acutely; re-
jected it, and moved on to what he felt was a sounder one.
In doing so he often did less than justice to the value of his
earlier studies. We find him saying of one book that it was
“nothing but unmitigated rubbish”, of another that it was
“complete nonsense”, of another that there was nothing
valid in it.’ It was Russell himself who saw most of the
snags in his Logical Atomism and made heroic efforts to
overcome them. It fell to self-criticism, not to attack from
outside.

One of the problems arising out of his philosophical
“realism” was concerned with the independence of the
object known in relation to the act of knowing. Russell and
the realists made a good point against the idealists when
they showed that the mind knows away from itself, and the
objects of perception exist independently of being known.
Russell made another point, really connected with the first,
when he insisted that things were not entirely constituted
by the wholes of which they were parts. The parts had
qualities of their own and could continue to possess them
when separated from other things. The idealist view

*Urmson, Philosophical Analysis.
* Russell, My Philosophical Development.
48

seemed to him, and to all the realists, to swallow up the
individuality of the part in the whole. He desired its in-
dependence and its uniqueness—as a good Whig should.

When he asserted that the object perceived was independ-
ent of the perceiver, Russell did not mean that it was out
of relation to the perceiver. He only meant out of any
relation which would imply dependence on the perceiver
for existence. He was insisting on the reality of what is
known as something separate from its being known. With this
realistic disproof of subjectivism no fault can be found. But
the activity of a mental factor in determining what we
perceive is too evident a fact to be denied. Perhaps Russell
missed it because he was not a working scientist, or any-
thing of a mechanic or creator, not even a gardener. He
was essentially an armchair philosopher, however intense
the cerebration in that recumbent situation. Every act of
cognition is itself a special kind of relationship and deter-
mines what is known: the botanist sees something different
from the poet in a field of daffodils; the engineer, or builder,
who knows how to make things, knows them differently
from the man who only uses them. Russell is right about
external relationships not affecting things. The ship leaves
one port and ties up at another without ceasing to be the
same ship, and the docks do not change because of a ship’s
departure either. But the cell or organ in the total organism
is functionally related to other cells or other organs and to
the life of the whole. It has no independent existence. Nor
has the human individual himself apart from the society with
which he has been intimately related since birth and apart
from other individuals on whom he is dependent and they
on him.

Russell’s independent relation to the object known is one
of passive reception of impressions—an idea which goes
back to the first great English empiricist Locke, with his
tabula rasa—the mind as a blank sheet on which impres-
sions from the outside world fall. Analysis began by dis-

. 49

cussing the relation of the sensory evidence of perception
to what was known. One recalls with some astonishment
the occasions when with Moore and his pupils we used to
gaze up at the ceiling, trying to discover whether or not
we were directly acquainted with universals, whether, in
fact, we could see whiteness itself, or only a white expanse
of plaster! Some philosophers believed that they perceived
sense data first, and through them became acquainted with
another entity, the physical object. Thus a new kind of
object was discovered, namely the sense datum; and at a
symposium on the subject, one teacher of philosophy was
emphatic that he had observed his pupils having for the
first time “the sense-datum experience”. But is perception
no more than the passive reception of impressions, the
observation of sense data?

It was Kant who saw the creative factor in perception,
but for him this was the work of the rational categories
built into the mind. When Russell rejected Kant it was the
intense subjectivity of Kant’s theory of knowledge which
he disliked, equally with Kant’s failure to get at the thing-
in-itself. Russell’s realism insisted that we did know the
thing itself; but he never understood that it is possible to
hold to that and still see that the conditions of knowing,
and the intention and direction of interest in handling,
modifying and making things, enter into our knowledge
along with the qualities of the material we work with and
the things we deal with.

The difficulties in which his realism was to involve him
appeared when Russell passed on to the next stage in his
philosophical progress—to the Analysis of Matter. It was
to become clear as he proceeded to develop his “realistic”
metaphysics that no consistent system can be built on the
principles of analysis which are basic for his thinking, or on
his doctrine of external relations and the independence of
the known object from the subject.

Before we leave the Russell of logical atomism we may

50

wish to ask whether a philosophical position which has been
shown to be untenable was ever worth the trouble of think-
ing it out, and whether it has any significance for us today.
Indeed it has. Almost every position which Russell advanced
had importance in what it denied as well as in what it
affirmed. The criticism it evoked itself carried philosophy
on to new understanding. Russell compelled philosophers
to look more carefully at their language, at exactly what
they were saying. His attempt to establish logical atomism in-
troduced a new rigour into philosophical discussion. On
the whole it strengthened the position of the empiricists who
were proceeding in the other direction from his purely
logical studies and were concerned with the validity of
statements which could be verified by observation and ex-
periment rather than the logical puzzles which even Russell
himself failed to elucidate.

But in the field of logical analysis itself Russell had started
something which others were to develop. He had set Wittgen-
stein on the path that led to the Tractatus. After ten more
years at Cambridge, Wittgenstein was to abandon the logical
positivism of that work and break entirely new ground
with the themes subsequently expounded in his Philo-
sophical Investigations. The work of Wittgenstein, which
derives directly from Russell, was to prove one of the most
influential philosophical positions of the century, and from
it stems the Analytical Philosophy of our times.

6

MIND AND MATTER

If there is one philosopher we constantly recall when read-
ing Russell it can be none other than Descartes. He was a
mathematician, the discoverer of analytical geometry, and
a logician; he wrote with incomparable lucidity and
charm—the first Frenchman to write philosophy in his native
tongue. Disgusted with the confusion of the academics he
wanted to secure the clarity and certainty of mathematical
reasoning in the field of philosophy by using the strict
logical methods which worked so well in mathematics. How
extraordinarily like Russell’s own programme !

But of course there were great differences. Descartes
thought that mathematics was not only the province of
absolute truth, but like Galileo and Newton he thought
that “God geometrises”, and that the framework of the
material world was mathematical. Russell, on the contrary,
knew that the postulates of mathematics were of human
construction and held for material reality only within cer-
tain limits. Descartes also required two ultimate realities—
matter and mind, which had nothing to do with one another
and could not interact; a position which left his successors
enough headaches to last them for three hundred years.
And then, he found the basis of absolute certainty, in both
the material and the mental world, in what he called “clear
and distinct ideas”. These he thought were absolutely in-
disputable and must obtain universal assent. They turned
out to be far from certain, and open to radical disagree-

a2

ment. Philosophical speculation has been busy with the
obscurities of his clear ideas ever since he wrote. That, I
suppose, is why he has been called the father of modern
philosophy.

So Descartes was very badly wrong, on all counts. But
cynicism is entirely out of place here. By removing from
the physical world every element of mentality—all the
agencies, forces, interferences of spiritual entities—he estab-
lished the independence of physics and the universality in
that field of the measurable and the quantitative. In other
respects too his very errors proved enlightening, stimulating
and fertile. But that is another story.

His dichotomy of all reality into two ultimate realities—
matter whose only properties are to occupy space and to
move, and mind whose only property is to think—was one
of the boldest speculative theories ever to be propounded.
It created a dualism that has only been overcome success-
fully in our own time. Until then the fallacy of “the ghost
in the machine”, as Professor Ryle aptly describes it, created
insoluble problems. These problems Russell attempted to
solve in his two most important philosophical works: The
Analysis of Matter, and The Analysis of Mind.

The Analysis of Matter

Russell, under the influence of Bradley and McTaggart,
had inclined to the idealist philosophy in his undergraduate
days. As propounded by Bishop Berkley it declared that
since we only perceive colours, sounds, smells and tactile
sensations, and these are all in the mind, we can have no
knowledge of an external world. It is obvious, Berkeley
argues, that “all the choir of heaven and furniture of the
earth, in a word all those bodies which compose the mighty
frame of the world, have not any subsistence without a mind,
their being is to be perceived; that consequently so long
as they are not actually perceived by me, or do not exist in
my mind or that of any other created spirit, they must either

53

have no existence at all, or else subsist in the mind of some
eternal spirit.””*

Berkeley did not of course deny for a moment the real
existence of solid, coloured things in space, which we can
handle. As he says, by his idealist theory “we are not
deprived of any one thing in nature. Whatever we see,
feel, hear, or anywise conceive or understand, remains as
secure as ever, and is as real as ever”. So that Dr. Johnson
did not refute Berkeley by kicking a stone with great force
and saying “I refute it thus”. In fact many philosophers
have said that the theory is impossible to refute, but at the
same time nobody believes it. To the objection that if a
thing ceases to be perceived it is no longer anywhere,
Berkeley replied that God always perceives everything. “If
there were no God, what we take to be material objects
would have a jerky life, suddenly leaping into being when
we look at them.”? As it is they have a continuous existence
owing to God’s perceptions. Russell proceeds to quote
Ronald Knox’s limericks which admirably set forth the ideal-
ist case :

There was a young man who said, “God
Must think it exceedingly odd

If he finds that this tree

Continues to be
When there’s no-one about in the Quad.”

To which comes the Berkeleyan reply :

Dear Sir, Your astonishment’s odd,
Iam always about in the Quad.
And that’s why the tree
Will continue to be,
Since observed by
Yours faithfully,
GOD.

* Berkeley, Principles of Human Knowledge.
* Russell, History of Western Philosophy.

54

It was necessary, if Russell was not to remain permanently
in bondage to idealism and write no more philosophy, to
refute idealism. This he begins to do in his Problems of
Philosophy.

He has some amusing things to say about perceptual
cats which never get hungry while they are not perceived.
Then he goes on to show that Berkeley is confusing the
thing apprehended with the act of apprehension. “In the
mind” only implies that we cannot be aware of the exist-
tence of anything without thinking about it, that is, we
apprehend it by the mind; but that does not mean that
what we apprehend is in the mind. Being “in the mind”
only means being an object for mind, or being thought of.
It does not follow from our perceiving things that the things
we perceive are actually mental states—bits of mind, as it
were. We can in fact only think of something because it
is something other than our thought about it. In fact we
define mind as “that which possesses the characteristic of
becoming acquainted with things other than itself”®

But by what processes do we become aware of physical,
objects? What we know by acquaintance is not the object
itself but a number of sense data.* We perceive hardness,
smoothness, brownness and so forth. These become the ulti-
mate terms or elements of our analysis of the external world
The material thing is a construct from such sensations. There
is no need to postulate or “infer” the existence of “the thing”
in addition to the sensations, but neither can its existence
be reduced simply to that of the momentary sensations of
any particular person at a particular time. Those sensations
would be said to reveal only one momentary “aspect” of the
thing, whereas other sensations would correspond to other
aspects. The thing is therefore to be defined as the totality
(or “‘class’’) of all its possible aspects, or in other words, of
all possible sense data deriving from it. “All aspects of things

* The Problems of Philosophy. (1912).
* The Analysis of Matter. (1927).
55

are real, whereas the thing is a mere logical construc-
tion.”

For example a star is just the appearances or aspects of
the star which different people in different places see, and
which would be thrown on the sensitised plates of cameras
wherever cameras might be. It is unnecessary to add a real
star as the source from which these aspects come. Where
and what are these aspects? They are at every point at which
a visual image, in eye or on camera plate, would be possible.

Some of us can remember Russell lecturing some time in
1915 or 1916 about what we perceive when we perceive
a penny. He pulled a penny out of his pocket and held it
up for us to see. We gazed at it hypnotically. He turned it
over and whirled it around. We followed his every move.
What do we perceive, he asked, when we perceive a penny?
It appears, really, as a series of little, two-dimensional
elliptical discs which run out to us like buttons on a wire.
There are rows of such discs running out in all directions
to all possible observers. Then he said that the penny that
we saw was smaller than the penny he saw, though to us it
didn’t look smaller than pennies usually are. Finally he told
us that the collection of all possible aspects was the only
real penny. Though how we were to correlate so many
things he didn’t tell us. Instead, he gave the penny a final
twirl in the air and put it back in his pocket, at which we
all gasped. For just what it was he was putting in his pocket
had by this time become an ineffable mystery.

Russell created some amusement on another occasion
when he said that Leibnitz would have been surprised to
discover that “the end of his nose was a colony of spiritual
beings.””* But surely it is just as startling to discover that the
end of one’s nose is a six-dimensional manifold of Russell
perspectives !

We see, then, that it is the aspects of the thing that are

° A view which follows from Leibnitz’s theory of the world as con-
stituted by spiritual atoms or monads.

56

real, whereas the thing itself is a logical construction. The
theory indicates a considerable development of Russell’s
earlier views about the plain recognition of perceived objects
existing beyond the knowing mind. He is now averse from
admitting the existence of any entities other than the sense
data which we experience in sensation.

A curious consequence of this theory of perspectives is
that the world really consists of the totality of views of it
from all the places from which it could be seen; whether at
these places are cameras or minds, there must be a special
and peculiar view of the world from that place. Aspects of
the world exist from all possible points of view, although no
observer need necessarily be perceiving them. It follows
that each aspect of the world which is presented to a differ-
ent viewpoint in space is independent of mind in respect of
its existence, and an external reality is therefore established
which is non-mental.

This almost reverses the common-sense view for which
any object, such as a star, is a real physical object and
its appearances to different people are merely appearances.
But on Russell’s view, the appearances are the reality, and
the star a construction made from them.

This, however, is only the beginning of Russell’s enquiry.
Everything that has been said points forward to the next
step in his analysis—to the analysis of mind.

The Analysis of Mind

Hume, when he considered the mind as that which per-
ceives, could never find it by inspection. There was nothing
there but the sensations themselves. They did not appear
to inhere in a spiritual substance—like pins in a pin cushion.
Hume concluded that there was no such thing. However,
as a critic observed, that was rather like a man looking in at
his own window and, seeing nobody in the room, conclud-
ing that he didn’t exist.

Russell went much farther than Hume. Not only are

57

minds logical constructions out of sense data, but they are
logical constructions out of the same sense data that make
up physical objects. Russell abolishes the distinction be-
tween our experiencing sensations and the sense data we
experience.°

Consciousness as a function of mind disappears. It is
found to consist of a certain complex of sensations and
images related in a certain way. Only in such a group do we
find what we call consciousness. Our sense data are so little
in themselves states of consciousness that they are in fact
the constituents of the material world, although they are
also the constituents of mind. A patch of colour and our
sensation in seeing it are identical.

This brings us back to Descartes’ dualism: the two ulti-
mate realities, mind and matter, “the ghost in the machine”.
Philosophers have tried desperately to resolve this duality
into a more fundamental unity, and in so doing to bring the
whole realm of existence under a common formula. They
found they could only succeed by abolishing either mind
or matter. The materialists abolish mind, making it a mere
epiphenomenon, a glow on the surface of things—the froth
on the beer. The idealists abolish matter in the manner of
Bishop Berkeley. But, as Russell pointed out, strange things
are going on today. Under the influence of modern physics
matter has been growing less material. Under the influence
of behaviourist psychology, the mind is becoming less mental.
It is therefore not difficult to abolish the distinction by re-
garding sense data as what Russell calls “neutral particu-
lars”; the word “neutral” suggesting that they are in them-
selves neither mental nor material.

These sense data are arranged in different contexts. Taken
in one context and arranged as the series of sensations at the
locus of my head and as a time sequence within it, they can
be regarded as psychological and constitute the elements
of that kind of logical construct we call a mind. Taken in

*The Analysis of Mind (1921).
58

another way and lifted out of the mental series as an aspect
of an object, and combined with all the other aspects from
every imaginable point of view, they can be regarded as
physical and as elements of that logical construct we call
a physical object.

The Return to Solipsism

Solipsism is the view, to which idealists are prone, that
everything we know or can know consists in the ideas and
sensations in our minds. The individual self of the solipsistic
philosopher is therefore the whole of reality, and the external
world and other persons are modifications of the single mind,
or phenomena (appearances) within it having no independ-
ent existence.

This is such a very attractive theory to certain people, so
obvious, so impossible to refute, that one such person re-
marked how strange it was that everybody did not believe
it!

Now if the only objects with which we are directly
acquainted—and this is not only the conclusion of the
analysis of matter and the analysis of mind, but also the
basic principle of logical atomism—are essentially private
to the person who has them, how can we come to know
the external world and other people? We certainly believe
objects to exist and our friends to be real persons, but these
are inferences from subjective experiences. We are in a
closed chamber looking at pictures on a screen which we
would like to think relate directly to actual objects and
persons."

The pictures, Russell would say, are caused by a chain of
events beginning with light reflected from the object and
falling on the retina, continuing as a succession of electro-

"And reverting to the view that we construct our picture of the
world out of atomic propositions reflecting sense data, the totality of
atomic propositions intelligible to me is intelligible to no-one else—
for these are based solely on my sense data. Any communication is
impossible.

59

chemical disturbances passing up a nerve, and ending in
the agitation of the molecules in a group of cortical neurones
in the occipital region of the brain. If that is the case, then
this disturbance is a succession of mental events or sensa-
tions.

But why in the world should I suppose that the last effect
resembles the first occurrence in the physical world which
started the process resulting in a sensation? But this is pre-
cisely Russell’s theory. “Everything that we can directly
observe of the physical world happens inside our heads and
consists of mental events.” This is odd. It sounds, as just
stated physiological, even materialistic, but it ends up as
something indistinguishable from idealism.

But by a curious inconsistency, as Whitehead has pointed
out,’ the same people who express themselves as though
bodies, brains and nerves were the only real things in an
entirely imaginary world of sensations within the closed
chamber of the mind base all their evidence on physio-
logical facts and experiments which assume the reality of
bodies, brains, nerves and microscopes and the actual exis-
tence of human bodies. But our evidence for the brains and
light waves and retinas and nerves and cortical neurones
which we accept as absolutely real in order to prove our
theory, is of exactly the same type as our evidence for the
external world of which, they say, we have no certain know-
ledge. Russell is treating perception on materialist principles
in order to see the rest of the world from the idealist point
of view; and it won’t do.

It is a most curious argument and a surprising one for
so acute a logician as Bertrand Russell.

The plain fact is that it is only because Russell knows
first that there are external objects and proceeds to argue
on the basis of the evidence they provide him with, basing
his whole argument on what he fells us is going on in a real,
material world, that he is able to infer that our knowledge

* Whitehead, Science and the Modern World.

60

consists only of sense data and to prove that nothing else
exists.

The argument is, from the other end, so to speak, only
Bishop Berkeley all over again. Russell, like the bishop,
confuses perceiving and the thing perceived, perception and
the brain event. He fails to understand that we do not per-
ceive perceptions, or even brain events; we perceive objects.
To quote the earlier Russell once again against the later
Russell: “The faculty of being acquainted with things
other than itself is the main characteristic of a mind.”

The Mind in Action

Russell’s own disinclination for the manipulative activities
of the physical laboratory and his preference for armchair
speculation must have something to do with the cul de sac
into which his analysis of mind and matter has led him.
Maurice Cornforth has shown how “the general philosophy
of empiricism takes a view wherein knowledge arises simply
from the passive contemplation of given facts by the in-
dividual mind; not from the interaction of the knowers
and the known, those who gain knowledge being themselves
a part of the world, and gaining knowledge through the
practical activity of changing the world.’”*

Empiricism condemns itself to failure by an error closely
associated with the idea of passive reception of sensations.
Descartes believed that the mind knows itself more easily
and more certainly than it knows objects. We have here
the root of the fallacious subjectivism which ends up in
Hume’s scepticism and Russell’s solipsism, the view that
each person is shut up in his own thoughts and knows only
himself and his sensations and not the external world and
other people. This naturally creates an insoluble problem.
How can the mind get outside itself to the real physical
world when it is forever shut up inside its own walls? If
this is assumed as obviously true, then step by step, how-

*Cornforth, Science versus Idealism.

61

ever subtle our arguments, we get deeper and deeper into
hopeless confusion. But the assumption is as unnecessary
as it is false. We do not know, primarily, the mind and its
interests. We know away from the mind. If we start with
Descartes and Locke, who made the same assumption, we
are bound to end up with Hume and Russell; and, more-
over, we can know nothing whatever about the basic struc-
ture of the world. Yet it is just that that we most need to
know, not for philosophical purposes, but to control it and
satisfy human need.

It was through biology on the one hand, and through the
great development of the sciences when they passed from
the laboratory to the field of engineering and industry on
the other, that it became clear where idealism had gone
wrong. “If we regard man as a biological creature actively
adjusting himself to an environment, and experience not as
a picture in the mind but such a process of adjustment, and
knowledge, not as a copy of a real world, but as a definite
relation between an intelligent organism and its environ-
ment, then the problem is transformed, and, set in new
terms, is possible of solution.”

And to this we can add that we begin with knowledge of
the external world, and have no need to prove it, or assume
it, What we have to do is to find out when we are mistaken
as to facts about it, illusions about it, and theories about it;
and sometimes, whether what we think we know is real or
some form of hallucination. We correct our knowledge by
our critical methods, which are many and various, ranging
from common sense to psychiatry, and from scientific ex-
periments to the critical procedures whereby we reject and
accept far-ranging theories. We do not have to prove ulti-
mate truth, a procedure leading to infinite regress. We have
to disprove error, and what cannot be disproved or refuted
experimentally remains thus far true, but always liable to
modification in the face of further tests. These sometimes

* J. H. Randall, The Making of the Modern Mind.

62

correct it and sometimes compel us to change the theory,
extending its range and therefore getting nearer to the truth
than in its earlier form.

Russell’s analytical method has persuaded him that things
we take to be real—green grass, hard stones, cold snow—
are not so." To imagine so is, he says, “naive realism, i.e.
the doctrine that things are what they seem”. But realism
is not “naive realism”. It is well aware that there are illus-
ions and other misleading appearances. These may be
detected and we must, as realists, proceed critically in deter-
mining what is real. But the result is not to dispel all realistic
knowledge; on the contrary the grass remains green, stones
are hard, and we continue to believe that snow is cold.

Russell is constantly falling into the mistake of reducing
such knowledge to end effects in the brain. He speaks of
science “at war with itself”, “finding itself plunged into
subjectivity”. But whatever may be involved in the series
of events which lead to the perception of external objects
with their qualities, as perceived under certain specified
conditions, this does not in the least lessen the reality with
which in the event we are dealing on the level of ordinary
experience. On that level the stone not only appears to be
hard, it zs hard; and the grass is really green. The fact that
we can discover the sequence of events leading up to what
occurs on the level of ordinary experience does not in-
validate that experience, any more than a chemical analysis
of the paints of Rubens’ “Judgment of Paris” demonstrates
that the painting itself is an illusion, and that in reality it
consists only of certain compounds of iron, copper and
cobalt.

We must not allow the physicist or the physiologist or the
logician to make a metaphysic out of a method. The object
of the method is to give us greater understanding of the
natural world so that we can control it and use it on the
level of everyday life. Science does not diminish reality. Its

™ An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth.
63

aim is not to make the world disappear, but to serve human
needs. Reality is not impugned by the discovery of the
micro-structure of matter or the physiological processes of
perception. Physiological techniques are not engaged in for
the purpose of demonstrating that all reality exists in our
heads or in our minds, or to establish any other metaphysical
doctrine, but to further the ability of medicine to deal with
human ills, to improve the health of real people with real
bodies in a real material world.

In his Introduction to Lange’s History of Materialism
Russell discusses the change brought about by scientists in
our understanding of the nature of matter. “The old solidity
is gone and with it the characteristics that made it seem more
real than fleeting thoughts.” In his Outline of Philosophy he
says that we cannot any longer believe that we can feel the
solidity of material objects. We cannot, for instance, press
our fingers against a table and feel its hardness. This is
because it consists of electrons and protons which are only
collections of radiation processes. Therefore although you
think you are touching the table, this is not the case.

But surely you do not think mistakenly that you are
touching the table? If “touching” is impossible, how do we
come to use the word? how do we know what “touching”
means? All that Russell can say is that the physicist no
longer believes that solid objects consist of small hard par-
ticles; but that is not to say that the table is no longer a
solid object.

Scientific work must of course abstract certain elements
and factors from the complexity of the whole, and must
descend below the level of everyday experience; it must
isolate certain aspects, detaching them from the complex
situation in which they normally occur. But ultimately the
scientist returns to concrete realities with his knowledge of
structure and law. “The physicist deals with a selection of
the properties of what there is in the world, and his success
in investigation depends upon his isolating those properties

64

and considering them on their own account.’? He is not
concerned with tables, and his job is not to persuade us
that they do not exist.

Russell always seems to be trying to establish a complete
divorce between physical theories and their application.
He fails to see that while in the process of getting useful
theories physics becomes more abstract, the world itself has
not become abstract. It remains as it is.

* Stebbing, Philosophy and the Physicists.

7

‘“YOU’RE RIGHT IF YOU THINK
YOU ARE”

Russell’s Autobiography opens with a Prologue entitled
What I have Lived for. “Three passions,” he says, “simple
but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life : the long-
ing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity
for the suffering of mankind. These passions, like great
winds, have blown me hither and thither, on a wayward
course, over a deep ocean of anguish, reaching to the very
verge of despair.”

He elaborates these compelling ideals, and tells us that
while love and truth often left him above the earth, pity
brings him back to it. “Echoes of pain reverberate in my
heart. Children in famine, victims tortured by oppressors,
and the whole world of loneliness, poverty and pain make
a mockery of what human life should be. I long to alleviate
the evil.”

We do not wish for a moment to question such a faith or
to cavil at any of these words. It is because Russell proceeds
to analyse his own moral convictions in a manner which
seems to undermine them, because he is convinced that
reason can play no part in leading us to moral truth, clari-
fying and strengthening our moral aims, that on ethical
grounds his moral philosophy seems inadequate and un-
philosophical.

It is often supposed—indeed Russell seems to suppose so—
that a strong moral conviction must not be questioned, can-

66

not be questioned; that in its presence reason is bidden to
be silent. The assumption always is that moral convictions
are invariably noble, true, authoritative and are only chal-
lenged by cynics, sophists and the wicked. Unfortunately
that is not the case. Many practices which Russell, and most
of those he would call enlightened, detest as evil are
accepted, believed and defended by those whose sincerity
cannot be doubted. It is a poor argument to say that anyone
who doubts our moral code and accepts one we regard as
morally wrong must be insincere, lying, self-deceived,
dangerously wicked. That is the moral dogmatism that leads
to tyranny and persecution. But if two moral judgments
are in complete opposition, not merely as being different,
but as declaring from each point of view that the other
is saying “evil be thou my good”, then must we not find
some means of criticising and testing moral standards, moral
judgments? Russell denies this absolutely. A most surprising
attitude in a philosopher who has devoted all his powers
to demonstrating “that it is undesirable to believe a propo-
sition when there is no ground whatever for supposing it
true”, who has brought scrupulous rational analysis to bear
on accepted judgments on human beliefs, on unexamined
customs and habits!

“The unexamined life,” said Plato, “is not worth living”;
and he meant above all human behaviour, moral codes, the
opinions by which men live. Is Russell exempting the moral
life from examination? Are the grounds of moral proposi-
tions never to be examined and questioned? This is one of
the great ages of cant and fantasy. It is supremely in the
moral sphere that we want neither dogmatism nor exped-
iency but the uncompromising intellectual honesty that
Russell has displayed in every other field of life and thought
that he has examined.

Yet when Russell comes to examine values, to discuss the
moral law, he declares that all values lie outside the realm
of truth and falsehood. They are not found in the external

67

world, as many philosophers have believed; and “since no
way can be even imagined for deciding a difference as to
values, the conclusion is forced upon us that the difference
is one of tastes, not one as to any objective truth. When we
assert that this or that has value, we are giving expression
to our own emotions, not to a fact that would still be true
if our personal feelings were different.”? If that is so then
every other man has as much right to his emotionally in-
duced values, even if they involve the overthrow of ours.
Russell proceeds to argue that reason has nothing to do
with our values, our goals in life, our ends, our ultimate
standards, but only with our choice of the means to attain
them. “Science can only deal with means, not with ends;
the ends must be supplied by feeling. For my part there are
certain things that I value; I should mention especially
intelligence, kindliness and self-respect. Science cannot prove
that these things are good; it can only show how, assuming
them to be good, they are to be obtained. In matters of
fact, the premisses come from perception; in matters of
value, from feeling. A man is not unscientific because of his
ultimate ends, but because of mistakes as to how to achieve
them.” This would no doubt apply to Hitler, who was
unfortunate enough to miscalculate the effectiveness of the
means to ends which we have no right to question.

We must not suppose that in taking this subjective atti-
tude to morals Russell is less than serious. He holds this
position because as a philosopher he finds no rational
grounds for ethical judgments. Yet he himself admits that
he cannot be consistent about this position, for again and
again he treats his moral convictions as categorical impera-
tives obligatory for all men. He obviously believes that so
far from his pity for “children in famine” being merely a
matter of taste, it is something all men ought to feel, as he
declares over and over again. And on such questions as

*A Broadcast, printed in The Listener, Sep. 23rd 1948.
? Tbid.
68

war, the atomic bomb, and so on he eloquently urges us all
to believe with him and act with him. Behind this ethical
passion is obviously a conviction that humanitarian ends
are objectively right and true for all men. It is this incon-
sistency that is not only surprising but regrettable. There
are too many people today who would like to believe that
moral obligation is subjective, relative and groundless, a
matter of convention, or sentiment. Others like the Atheni-
ans at Melos reply to appeals to justice and pity: “In this
world the strong do what they can, and the weak do what
they must.” When Burke denounced the French Revolution
and demanded pity for the outraged nobility, Tom Paine
replied : “You pity the plumage and forget the dying bird.”
Why pity the dying bird, why pity “children in famine”,
if your strong inclination is to pity the plumage ?

The subjectivity of moral judgments has, in fact, been
seriously and ably defended by moral philosophers, and is
far from being a mere matter of academic quibbling. Russell
is by no means alone in this belief, it was strongly supported
by his Cambridge friend and colleague Moore, and is today
defended by Ayer, Stevenson and many others. In 1903,
the same year in which Russell published The Principles of
Mathematics, G. E. Moore published his influential
Principia Ethica. Russell frequently speaks of the great
influence Moore had on his philosophical outlook. It was
Moore who directed his “realist” criticism against idealism,
established the analytical method in philosophy, and
demanded ruthless precision in definition and verbal usage.
This was the strength of his ethical criticism and of his great
influence on Cambridge philosophy. His point was that the
value we set upon anything is not to be defined or explained
in terms of the thing’s own properties, which do not in them-
selves imply any value. You cannot extract an ethical quality
out of non-ethical facts. It is therefore a “non-natural”
quality, itself undefinable (like a colour), which we attach to
something—good food, a picture, health, sex. It is itself

69

equivalent as a non-natural quality to a natural quality,
like yellow; but it is perceived by a faculty for the appre-
hension of this moral quality, which is different from the
faculty by which we apprehend natural qualities.’

Moore influenced not only Russell, but Maynard Keynes,
Lytton Strachey, Clive Bell, E. M. Forster and others who
came to be known as the Bloomsbury Group. Good, they all
came to believe, cannot be defined. To be aware of good-
ness is a state of mind that is unique. It is distinct from
the pleasurable, the desirable, from what we approve. When
we say that something is good we have before the mind a
unique property of that thing—its goodness.‘

Moore points out, and it would be quite impossible for
Russell to disagree with him on the basis of his own sub-
jective grounds for moral belief, that when one man says
“This is right”, and another answers “No, it is not right”,
“each of them is always merely making an assertion about
his own feelings. It plainly follows that there is never any
difference of opinion between them: the one of them is
never really contradicting what the other is asserting. They
are no more contradicting one another than if, when one
had said, ‘I like sugar’, the other had answered, ‘I don’t
like sugar.’ In such a case there is, of course, no conflict of
opinion, no contradiction of one by the other: for it may
perfectly well be the case that what each asserts is equally

* A distinction may be drawn between Moore’s apprehension of the
good as a quality of things recognised by a special faculty, and Russell’s
infallible intuition of moral truth. One lays the emphasis on “good”
as an objective quality, the other on the subjective conviction; but
both reject reason as a necessary factor in reaching a moral judgment.

‘This position is fundamentally the “intuitionist” theory of ethical
judgment, one of those things for which no proof is required and
none is available. Later Ayer and Stevenson advanced the “emotive”
theory which held that a moral statement does no more than express
one’s ethical feelings. It was then added that such expressions of
emotion may arouse feelings in others and so stimulate action. Thus
we arrive at the dynamic in addition to the expressive meaning of
moral words.

70

true.”* The one man does like sugar; the other man doesn’t.
The one therefore is never denying what the other is assert-
ing. This is equally the case with respect to moral judg-
ments; the one is never denying what the other is asserting,
he does not deny that the second man feels that the action
in question is not wrong. This involves “the very curious
consequence that no two men can ever differ in opinion as
to whether an action is right or wrong.”®

Moral judgments that are settled by intuition are unreliable
and variable. In Russell’s own experience they have proved
reversible. In the Munich period he was a fervent pacifist
and brought his powerful influence to bear on the side of
appeasement.’ He advocated “the existence of a single
supreme government’, and opposed any alliance with
Russia. But when war came he reversed his position and
supported the war. He now gives his full support to Nuclear
Disarmament but in 1946 he advocated an atomic war
against Russia. He declared that “either we must have a war
against Russia before she has the atom bomb or we will
have to lie down and let them govern us.” He advocated
presenting Russia with an ultimatum, and when she refused
as she was sure to do, then we should use the atom bomb.
A successful war against Russia, he affirms, “would produce
a renaissance of hope and joy and creativeness, a great leap
of the human spirit, leading to a new achievement in art,
in science, in politics, and in the organisation of a humane
way of life.’®

The ethical problem is not to be solved by absolute judg-
ments based on intuition. The divorce of fact and value, for
which Moore was largely responsible, is a mistake. Facts,
reason, and the combination of individual judgment and

"Moore, Ethics.

* Ibid.

"Which Way to Peace?

® Morning News, May 28th 1949 (Published by the Allied Com-

mission in Austria). Russell admitted his advocacy of such an atomic
war in his Face to Face interview with John Freeman.

71

social discussion based on general experience are among the
factors necessary for moral decisions and the formation of
criteria of value—but they are never absolute.

When moral principles are advanced dogmatically and
irrationally, on the basis of emotion and intuition, they are
similar to the religious dogmas which have been responsible
for devastating wars and all the horrors of persecution.
E. M. Forster once said “The man who believes because he
feels it in his bones is not really very far removed from the
man who believes it on the authority of a policeman’s
truncheon”, and one might add, is himself prepared to
enforce his views by the same means.

Russell’s conviction that “science can deal only with
means, not with ends; the ends must be supplied by feel-
ing”® not only misses the vital importance of science in
medicine and psychology, as well as in matters of scientific
agriculture and the physical sciences, in helping to decide
on our goals, but is at variance with that tolerance which
depends on rational judgment not the blind authority of
passionate feeling. ‘“Dogmatists,” says Russell, “fear that
free discussion would show their beliefs to be groundless.”
But there can be no discussion on the basis of subjective feel-
ings, as Moore and Ayer have clearly shown.

Russell has always opposed religious dogmatism, which
he defines as a “set of beliefs held as dogmas, dominating
the conduct of life, going beyond or contrary to the evi-
dence”. But in the field of morals and politics Russell admits
that his own beliefs go beyond the evidence since they are
not reached by reason but by intuition. By removing morals
from the sphere of reason and scientific investigation, all
he can say about them is that they are his own. In that case,
in terms of his own definition, they are as dogmatic as the
religious beliefs he condemns.

Russell has criticised philosophers who reason about the
universe with a strong inclination to interpret it in line

° Scepticism and Tolerance—in The Western Tradition (1949).

a2

with their own preferences. He is indeed correct. Philosophy
began in the separation of rational enquiry from emotionally
held intuition. That was why Plato was critical of the poets
of his day who offered as “truths” the products of their own
excited imaginations. Philosophy has ever since been un-
willing to exalt convictions which are merely felt to the level
of convictions which can be shown to be reasonable.

Hence when Russell comes to us to display his talents
and proclaim his inspired moral truths, we are tempted to
treat him as the citizen of Plato’s Republic treated the poet,
paying him reverence as a sacred, admirable and charming
personage, but sending him away to another city after
pouring perfumed oil on his head and crowning him with
woollen fillets. Having learned a tolerance which Plato
did not possess, we shall not send him away, but we shall
certainly point out to him that his message is not sufficient
for our contemporary needs, and that, while we owe him
a great debt, both for his instruction and for entertainment,
we must, as regards moral and social enlightenment, turn
from him and look for something of greater weight and sub-
stance.

73

8

MAN AND HIS FREEDOM

In his Roads to Freedom (1960) Russell affirms that faith
in the development of the freedom, individuality and self-
expression of the individual which runs through everything
that he said and wrote on the social question.

“It is the individual in whom all that is good must be
realised, and the free growth of the individual must be the
supreme end of a political system which is to refashion the
world.”

We are aware in everything he writes of the humanitar-
ian passion and the concern for the release of the spirit
from every kind of limitation, from all tyranny and repres-
sion. This is Russell the man. But we are none the less
compelled to relate this to the child who was the father of
the man; and the Autobiography makes clear the environ-
mental influences that went to the making of the humanist
as well as the philosopher.

In his History of Western Philosophy Russell says that it
was one of his principal aims “to exhibit each philosopher
as the outcome of his milieu, a man in whom were crystallized
and concentrated thoughts and feelings which, in a vague
and diffused form, were common to the community of which
he was a part”. That community was for his own develop-
ment the great Whig family of the Russells and the wide
circle of scholarly aristocrats and public men who were
either closely related or on intimate terms with his father’s
family or his mother’s—the Stanleys.

74

He has described himself as the last survivor of a dead
epoch, an eminent Victorian born too late. When he met
Keynes and Lytton Strachey at Cambridge, he says that
while he and his friends were Victorians, they, the generation
of ten years later, were Edwardians who “aimed at a life
of retirement among fine shades and nice feelings, and con-
ceived of the good as consisting in the passionate mutual
admirations of a clique of the élite”.* He, however, was still
seriously concerned with the politics of progress and the wel-
fare of people. His discerning and critical mind was vexed
and dismayed by all that could be seen around him,
and he became a devastating critic of our present discon-
tents.

But behind this concern we cannot miss the outlines of
the philosophical individualism of the Whig party, of the
eighteenth century radicals, of Bentham, Adam Smith, and,
farther back, even Locke and Leibnitz—Adam Smith who
objected to any interference with individual liberty, Leibnitz
who saw the world as a collection of monads, separate
entities existing independently of each other and only related
by a “pre-established harmony”, a remarkable anticipation
of Russell’s logical atomism and his pluralist philosophy.
This powerful tendency reflected the rise to independence
and power of the new merchant and industrial classes.
Typically, one of the literary heroes of the time was none
other than Robinson Crusoe, all alone on his island, flourish-
ing purely on the basis of individual enterprise and his
Protestant faith.

His Protestant faith—for religion had a hand in this
exaltation of the individual, as Tawney shows. The new
moral and economic ideology was powerfully aided by the
Protestant ethic which came to strengthen and inspire the
social order that followed monarchical feudalism. The
medieval conception of the social order as a highly inte-
grated organism, each member contributing to the common

* Autobiography.
75

good, was shattered and its individual members dispersed
as mere units each seeking his own happiness.

Luther saw the authority of custom, law and statute
replaced by the regenerated soul of the saved man welling
up to live the godly life. The ultimate entity was the in-
dividual who had made his personal peace with God. There-
after his own faith and conscience revealed to him God’s
truth. In the liberty to read the Scriptures and learn what
he might from them sprang a new rationalism which
developed into both religious and political liberalism. A
new faith in human life sprang from a trust in man’s
impulses, when purified from sin, which had its counter-
part in the faith of the humanists. The followers of Calvin
journeyed through theocracy to a conception of civil liberty
and the first elements of democracy, exemplified in the City
Republic of Geneva. Thus, in spite of dogmatism and theo-
logical obscurantism, the authority of the individual con-
science and reason sprang from the Reformation, and 19th
century Liberalism was inspired by the faith of the Dissen-
ters. Once this spirit escaped from its theological trammels
it found expression in a rationalism that carried it far be-
yond the limits of Biblical Christianity.

There was much of this notion of each man finding
salvation through personal faith, through his own reason
and the authority of his own impulses, in the intellectual
environment in which the Russell family lived and in which
Bertrand Russell was nurtured. His “godfather” was John
Stuart Mill, the saint of rationalism.

His Principles of Social Reconstruction is built round the
fundamental notion of impulse. It is impulse, far more than
conscious desire or reason, which provides the rea] springs
of human actions. If a man can follow his impulses freely
he will tend so far to be happy; if he is prevented from
following them, he will be unhappy, frustrated. This is the
fatal weakness of our civilisation, Russell says. Personality
and individuality are crushed into conformity. Freedom is

76

the supreme good; for without it personality is impossible.

One can guess at once the theme of the books that fol-
lowed: Roads to Freedom (1918), How to be Free and
Happy (1924), On Education, especially in Early Child-
hood (1926), Marriage and Morals (1929). Much of this is
startling and challenging, all of it brilliantly written. In the
Sceptical Essays Russell deals pungently with the threat to
the individual of social authority. Some law is indeed neces-
sary, but “the growth of one individual or one community
is to be as little as possible at the expense of the other’.
Russell pours into his social philosophy the mysticism and
the sentiment which he had so resolutely repressed in his
attitude towards metaphysics and religion. The philosopher
who had tried to be a disembodied intellect was really a
bundle of feelings and moral passion.

He could be something more than a prophet of happiness
and freedom. He could wield a polemical pen that stabbed
and he had a scorn and a wrath that seared. He was indeed
an exceedingly complicated personality driven by a passion-
ate need for simplicity and clarity, which was responsible
for his lucid prose style, but also for his tendency to over-
simplify. His temperament could also make of him a rather
supercilious pamphleteer, sinking to trivial arguments, glar-
ing exaggerations and prejudicially selected instances. His
simplifications, his savage wit, combined with his animosity
and a desire to score off his opponents, could make him a
dangerous and unattractive foe.? Sometimes his great love
of mankind could be combined with a contemptuous hatred
for most individual men.

There was always something lacking in his social and
political writing. It was reason, philosophy, the rigorous
discipline of sound scholarship, which in many considerable
writers and philosophers by no means implied lack of heart.

* Especially perhaps in his Why I am not a Christian (1927), and

Has Religion Made Useful Contributions to Civilisation? (1930) and
also his Unpopular Essays (1950).

77

But just as his ethics was purely a matter of feeling, deliber-
ately cut off from reason, and his philosophy was, as
deliberately, the cult of pure abstraction and expressed in the
terms of mathematical logic, so his moral exhortation was
more passionate than informed, and more polemical than logi-
cal. None of his sociological works represents the exact conclu-
sions of scientific thinking. There is in fact no evidence at
all of any previous social thinkers being studied. He offers
no clear definition of that elusive concept, liberty. He never
realises that the only useful discussion of this issue must
avoid the simple dichotomy of society and the individual,
authority and freedom; for they are not necessarily anti-
thetical.

Both his wisdom and his failure to think clearly on social
questions are very clearly displayed in his Reith Lectures
on Authonty and the Individual (1949). Here the first two
lectures sketch the development of social cohesion from
primitive times down to the appearance of centralised gov-
ernment. Then he returns to the familiar emphasis on the
supreme value of the individual, and above all the value of
individual initiative, firstly for the happiness of the in-
dividual himself, and secondly for the benefit of the com-
munity which needs the best he can give it.

Russell’s conception of liberty is the very common one,
so convincingly expounded by John Stuart Mill,’ that liberty
means the removal of constraints, of interference, of oppres-
sive legal restrictions, of the social pressures of custom,
convention, disapproval and excommunication. On certain
occasions and at certain periods of history this is the liberty
that matters. Libertarian ideas in the eighteenth century
served the social and political aims of the forces rising to
power and marked a new stage in Western social progress.
But where the liberty concerned happens to be that of
privileged sections of society or racial castes who desire to
continue social practices which inflict deprivation on the less

* Mill, Liberty.
78

privileged, the cry of “liberty” is in the interests of the status
quo and of injustice.

Russell sees only the liberty of letting as many people as
possible do what they like in so far as they do not interfere
with the equal liberty of others to do the same. But he fails
to learn the lesson of the whole development of the indus-
trial revolution in the nineteenth century which showed all
political parties that ‘one law for the lion and the ox is
tyranny”, that laissez-faire moves inevitably to the greater
and greater restriction by poverty, by inescapable economic
law, of the overwhelming majority. Nobody intends this, It
is not the wilful cruelty of wicked men. It is what good men
find themselves doing although they don’t want to. Freedom
generates a mass of unfreedom at the opposite pole, man
enslaves himself to forces whose control is now beyond him.
So far from being free, he is whirled like a leaf on the gales
of social change. The freedom of each man’s struggles for
his own aims, so far from making men free, binds them
over to chance. Blind fate, in the shapes of war, unbalanced
trade, unemployment, slumps, accompanied by despair
and neurosis, attacks the free man. If this is the case, we
actually increase freedom by certain restraints (the Factory
Acts) or government regulations of trade, wages, employment
and the banks.

But Russell sees society only as exerting a regrettable if
necessary limitation on our freedom and therefore hamper-
ing the free development of personality. All social obliga-
tions are restraints on spontaneous liberty. The assumption
implicit in this view is that only the animal is really free.
No-one constrains the solitary carnivore to do anything.
Always in the mind of Russell there is the picture of the free
man hampered and corrupted by institutions. Unfortun-
ately not only is man not good without institutions, he is
not evil either. He is no man at all. Man finds his positive
freedom, the freedom to accomplish the things most import-
ant to fulness of life, from his daily bread to his enjoyment

79

of a symphony orchestra, only in society, only in the accept-
ance of the requirements of joint labour, in the fields of
economics, of agriculture, of learning and of the arts.
Society is the only instrument of freedom.*

Russell should go back to his early teachers McTaggart
and Bradley. Where does the individual come from, whose
self is to be realised? He is permeated by the world, by
heredity, by the traditions of his country, by his education.
He is born not into a desert but into a living society. “He
grows with his world, his mind fills and orders itself, and
when he can separate himself from that world, and know
himself apart from it, then by that time his self is penetrated,
infected, characterised by the existence of others. Its con-
tent implies in every fibre relations of community. Is he
now to try and develop his individuality, his self which is
not to be the same as other selves? Where is it? What is it?
Where can we find it? The soul within him is saturated,
is filled, is qualified by, it has assimilated, has got its sub-
stance, has built itself up from, it 7s one and the same life
with the universal life.”’

We learn that we are free not in spite of social relations
but through them. A man incapable of the subordination
of self to others, of co-operation, of accepting obligations
and responsibilities, remains the anarchistic individual. But
he may well be disgusted with the society that has grown
up around him on the basis of his own possessive individ-
ualism, and thus comprises, in a strange contradictory com-
plex, both all the possibilities and necessary conditions of a
rich personal life, and all the frustrations and destructive
forces which reduce life to chaos and despair.

In this situation Russell tends to believe that man can
only escape from the evil effects of such social relations
by casting them off and returning to a freer society with less
constraints. He believes that freedom and happiness can be

“But not of course in a corrupt society, e.g. under slavery.
*F.H. Bradley, Ethical Studies.

80

found by one’s own individual action. Everywhere today
will be found the conscious and unconscious followers of
Russell—‘‘the pacifists, the well meaning liberals, the
idealists, all seeking the impossible solution, salvation
through the free act of the individual will amid decay and
disaster. They cannot believe that freedom and happiness
can only be found through social relations, by co-operating
with others to change them.”*® What is responsible for our
despair is the assumption that an individualistic pattern of
society is the only possible one. Even in such a society co-
operation must persist or society would disintegrate, but this
is distorted and negated by the centrifugal forces of sheer
egoism. The question, as Rousseau said, is whether we can
re-mould society on a higher level than that of pre-industrial
society, but one in which, like it, the social order is regarded
as a highly articulated organism of members contributing in
their different degrees to a social purpose. Russell, while
admitting the benefits which have been achieved, deplores
the inevitable consequence of a developing civilisation, “the
increasing power of the state as against the individual”.
“Between those who care most for social cohesion and those
who primarily value individual initiative there has been
an age-long battle ever since the time of the Ancient Greeks.”
Hence we are becoming “‘static and unprogressive”, and he
sees ahead only “slavery, bigotry, intolerance and abject
misery for the majority of mankind”’.”

All Russell can hope for is an uneasy compromise be-
tween the pressures of society and creative initiative. The
state ought to attempt to bring about a social structure in
which the creative impulses are encouraged, and the posses-
sive discouraged. But he has no idea how this is to be done.

One way forward, he believes, would be the world state.
But surely this is a suggestion quite contrary to his conviction
that it is the growing size and complexity of society that

* Christopher Caudwell, The Concept of Freedom.
" Authority and the Individual.

: 81

most imposes frustration and tyranny on the individual ? He
sees also that this world state can hardly come about without
another world war. These arguments are clearly of the kind
which lead men to kill one another on the assumption that
one more war will do the trick. Russell has of course long
since abandoned this remedy.

When we contemplate Russell’s last word on the relations
between the individual and society we may ask whether the
anarchic individualism, which both gives rise to his logical
atomism and is also its logical outcome, limiting in-
dividual responsibility to a negative withholding of injury
from others, will indefinitely support democratic govern-
ment. This surely requires the positive assumption by each
individual of full social responsibility as a member of the
social and moral community, within which each life is
determined and by which it is shaped.

We may also ask whether the philosophical atomism
which Russell strives, and strives in vain, to make credible,
does not blind him to the real nature of the individual as a
member of a social community. Man is not an atomic unit.

As Maritain says:

“Man is very far from being a pure person; the human
person is a poor, material individual, an animal born more
poverty stricken than all other animals. . . . The human
person is at the lowest level of personality, stripped and
succourless; a person destitute and full of needs. Because
of these deep lacks and in accordance with all the com-
plements of being which spring from society and without
which the person would remain, as it were, in a state of
latent life, it happens that when a person enters into the
society of his fellows, he becomes a part of a whole larger
and better than its parts—and the entire person is engaged
in and exists with a view to the common good of society.’®

The fact that man transcends even the community does
not prove that he is not rooted in it. The uniqueness of the
* Jacques Maritain, The Rights of Man.

82

person and the richness of the community are one and the
same thing in a healthy society. Under pathological con-
ditions, under slavery, under any society which subordinates
the welfare of the majority to the privileges of the minority,
the pressures of society can be destructive of the individual.
One must however make the aim of the dialectical unity of
person and community. The individual without the com-
munity is a blindly drifting atom. As the egoist turns away
from society his self-inflation is his frustration and at the
same time an injury to the community. As the collective is
made supreme, both person and community are degraded.
As the person and the community are interdependent, nurtur-
ing and sustaining each other, they are of equal dignity, and
their proper balance is the health of man and society. No
evolutionary future awaits men except in association with all
other men.

83

9

MYSTICISM AND LOGIC

Russell has always been much too dedicated to the critical
examination of philosophy and every other form of thought
to be in any way disturbed by the same treatment of his own
endeavours. As he himself says, “The value of philosophy
is, in fact, to be sought largely in its very uncertainty. The
man who has no tincture of philosophy goes through life
imprisoned in the prejudices derived from common sense,
from the habitual beliefs of his age or his nature, and from
convictions which have grown up in his mind without the
co-operation or consent of his deliberate reason.””*

We have more need of the removal of errors and the
raising of hitherto unconsidered questions than the formul-
lation of wide systems of speculative metaphysics, of which
philosophy will know no more. The first, if not the last,
task of philosophy is “to remove the arrogant dogmatism
of those who have never travelled into the region of libera-
ting doubt”.

But Russell does not only criticise error, he proclaims the
principles of his own philosophy. And it is in his fundamental
pluralism—the splitting up of the world into a chain of
unrelated facts—that we find a theory which offers little
help in understanding either the world or society. Closely
dependent upon his atomism is the dualism of his thought,
the dichotomy of experience into fact and value, atomic
proposition and logical system, reason and morals. His con-

* The Problems of Philosophy.
84

viction about what is right is a property of his own mind
and has no foundation in the nature of man and the neces-
sities of social life. There is nothing that intelligence can
devise to get a grip on events and mould things nearer to
the heart’s desire. What he wants with all his heart, the great
humanitarian ideals he has worked for, are therefore com-
pletely out of reach. Inevitably pessimism underlies all his
reformist writing. It is the brilliant disclosure of human
folly and perversity which is remembered, rather than the
ineffectual remedies suggested. Disbelief in any human re-
generation drowns the short lived themes of hope and recon-
struction, which do not carry, or perhaps intend, much
conviction.

We owe a great debt of gratitude to Russell. We have too
often seen the intellect confused by visionary speculation
and muddled logic. Like Voltaire, Russell hated injustice, he
hated cruelty, he hated senseless repression and he hated
hocus-pocus. Furthermore, when he saw them, he knew
them. “But if men cannot live on bread alone, still less can
they do so on disinfectants”,’ and the positive element in
Russell’s philosophy provides nothing which shows men
how to co-operate with a nature that appears an alien
and irresistible mechanism.

In his well known essay on A Free Man’s Worship® Russell
is brutally candid about this.

“That man is the product of causes which had no prevision
of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth,
his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the out-
come of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no
heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve
an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labour of
the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noon-
day brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction
in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole

* Whitehead, Science and the Modern World.
* Mysticism and Logic.

85

temple of man’s achievement must inevitably be buried
beneath the debris of a universe in ruins—all these things,
if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that
no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only
within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm

foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation
henceforth be safely built.”

The roots of Russell’s pessimism lie in the basic dualism
of his thought, which also, and inevitably, offers a strong
inducement to seek relief in the very mysticism that he in
his better moments deplores.

When Descartes divided the world into two ultimate
realities, he gave encouragement to physical science to get
on with the task of discovering the mechanical laws of the
world which would “render ourselves the lords and possessors
of nature”, from which would flow vast benefits to man-
kind. The world of pure mind was left as the receptacle of
religious ideas, man’s ideals and dreams, the whole range of
his spiritual interests and concerns. It requires only a shift
of emphasis for this to move in one direction to idealism,
which asserts that even the physical world, being only in-
ferred from ideas in the mind, is really spiritual, or in the
other direction to a materialism which accepts the physical
world as real and the spiritual as merely the world of sub-
jectivity.

Very much the same result follows when reality is com-
prehended exclusively in terms of sense data and the logical
apparatus for dealing with them, and the ultimate reality
is unfolded in the analysis of the process of knowing. Ordin-
ary knowledge, which appears to be about the physical
world, begins and ends with sense data, so that the things
themselves disappear in the process of analysis. “The method
supposes that the more precise, more clear, and more
ultimate knowledge which we desire of the nature of things,
can be obtained by a purely logical-philosophical analysis,
as distinct from a continuation of scientific investigation—

86

ee

by passive contemplation as distinct from active investi-
gation.”’* Russell sees the task of the philosopher as con-
structing the world by a series of definitions, by an enter-
prise of philosophical speculation the results of which can-
not be tested or verified. The result can only be to lead
away from the path of useful knowledge into endless logical
debate which rejects “the clear objective impact of scientific
knowledge, as an ever-developing and ever more accurate
comprehensive picture of the objective world; to obscure
the fact that we have gained and are gaining objective know-
ledge in relation to which we need, not speculative interpre-
tation, but an understanding of how to apply it fully to
gain a mastery over nature and over our own des-
tinies.””*

Russell cannot dismiss entirely from his mind ideas which
his philosophy has excluded from the logically acceptable,
the objective world of sense data and logical constructions.
But what authority have they, what kind of reality is theirs,
how valid are the judgments of right and wrong, and the
human hopes and desires that so largely make them up?
Like Descartes’ spiritual furniture, they are relegated to
the mind alone. Demanding ideals to live for and principles
to live by, philosophy (and science) are silent. Russell, how-
ever, cannot dispense with them, nor can any of us.
The inference that he and those who listen to him must
draw is that for guidance in the problems of life, since we
must not seek it from thinking or from thinkers, we must
accept our intuitions and abandon the hopes of a rational
understanding of life. So far as “intuitions” are concerned
this may not do any harm to the wise and good, but it opens
the door to a torrent of illusions and fanatical ideas for the
foolish and the perverted.

All that Russell is so deeply concerned about socially and
morally is left by him hanging in the air unrelated to actu-

*Cornforth, Science Versus Idealism.
* Ibid.
87

ality, lacking any principles of discrimination to discern truth
from falsehood, right from wrong, unrelated to science,
and not capable of being developed as a rational sociology.
This is the inevitable consequence of the unrelieved dualism
of fact and value, science and society, ethics and the natural
order. It remains so not only for Russell, but for all linguistic
analysis that pursues only the path of endless logical regres-
sion, and for all those influenced in a second-hand way who
have been perusaded that our ideals and hopes, our moral
principles and anticipations of social progress belong to the
world of subjective values and not to the world of facts.

Cosmic Impiety

Russell is so overawed and intimidated by the hostility of
the universe to man’s ideals that he even engages in a
further philosophical argument against his own ideals, to
convince himself and all of us that they are powerless.

The belief in an external universe of recalcitrant fact
which the mind discovers but does not create has, he points
out, curbed man’s pride and kept him humble.

“The Greeks with their dread of hubris and their belief
in a Necessity or Fate superior even to Zeus, carefully
avoided what would have seemed to them insolence towards
the universe.’”®

“Cosmic impiety” occurs when the human mind legislates
instead of conforming to the universe, prescribing to it what
it should be instead of adopting a modest attitude to what
is. This is the source of intellectual hubris, the characteristic
vice of our time. Let us quote Russell on the subject:

“In all this I feel a grave danger of what might be called
cosmic impiety. The concept of ‘truth’ as something depend-
ent upon facts largely outside human control has been one
of the ways in which philosophy hitherto has inculcated
the necessary element of humility. When this check upon

* History of Western Philosophy.
88

ee ee

iin — a

pride is removed, a further step is taken on the road towards
a certain kind of madness—the intoxication of power which
invaded philosophy with Fichte, and to which modern men,
whether philosophers or not, are prone. I am persuaded that
this intoxication is the greatest danger of our time, and that
any philosophy which, however unintentionally, contributes
to it is increasing the danger of vast social disaster.””

If Russell were simply warning us against seeking to
impose our personal ideals upon the world regardless of
external conditions, no-one would quarrel with him. We
would agree that “truth must conform to objective fact, not
prescribe to it”. But scientific investigation discovers objec-
tive laws not to reconcile us to the inevitable but to show us
how to use them to human advantage. Russell himself
enjoys all the advantages of modern heating, sanitation,
travel, international trade to supply his dinner table (and
tobacco). He fully accepts the benefits of irrigation, scientific
agriculture, antiseptic surgery, antibiotics, the telephone and
the art of printing his books by machinery. This is not the
life of simply accepting nature as it is to Pithecanthropus
Erectus. It is altering the world, changing it, using its laws
to make the best use of its resources.

Russell’s statements lay themselves open to the profoundly
unscientific interpretation that the world cannot be changed
by human effort, that to accept the rule of natural law is to
confess one’s powerlessness. The fact is, of course, that it is
precisely our knowledge of natural laws that enables us to
alter the world, for we alter it by obeying them, by
“systematically making them work towards definite human
ends.”® It is not man’s whole duty to accept nature as it is,
but to change it. Nature is not a fixed quantity, a revolving
wheel, but a self-creative thing. It was making itself anew
before man appeared. When it evolved man it made some-

* Ibid.
* Engels, Anti-Diihring.

89

thing new and itself consciously and scientifically creative
in a new way.
This is an art
Which does mend nature, change it rather, but
The art itself is nature.®
“For man is a part of nature, carried on by her forces to
work the works of intelligence. In him she bursts forth into
sustained consciousness of her own evolution. ... You can-
not add him as some extraneous figure tacked on as a negli-
gible quantity to a sum already total, for he has grown out
of nature’s own stuff and been wrought in her workshop. He
is, then, no mere commentator in the world or spectator of it.
Nor can we regard the mechanism of nature as a factory
where machines run on, but where there is supreme in-
difference to the product. Rather must we regard it as that
which supports and maintains what we choose to call ideal
products, and finds in them its significance and justifica-
tion.””?°

This throws much light on those values and ideals which
for Russell belong wholly to the subjective mind and which
nature only contradicts. We are a part of nature and nature
has created us; our desires and values are therefore also
part of nature and produced by nature. They have indeed
proved a most effective force in constraining men to improve
their condition by discovering and utilising natural law.
Man is not in this respect opposed to nature. The moral
dimension becomes a dimension of the natural. We are not
concerned then to ask what nature is like considered apart
from man; for that is a wholly artificial abstraction. Nor
are we to ask what man is in his hopes and ethical prin-
ciples as though this could have nothing to do with nature.

Russell’s_ mistake is characteristic of the speculative
philosopher. If you look passively at nature it does of course
present a problem, and an insoluble one. If you consider the
work of thought to be the unravelling of knowing independ-

° Shakespeare, The Winter's Tale.
* Woodbridge, Nature and Mind.

90

ently of doing, this paralysis necessarily follows. Merely
looking at nature from without, and asking what it can all
mean and whether it in any way conduces to man’s good,
must be a purely speculative enterprise which is unable to
arrive at any verifiable conclusions, conclusions, that is to
say, which can be tested by experiment, or further observa-
tions, or by trying the theory out in the field of practical
affairs. Its whole tendency is to lead away from real know-
ledge into purely abstract discussions.

The shift of reason away from scientific and historical
problems to those of logic and language, away from the
actual world in which philosophers cease to be interested
as philosophers, leaves the actual world not only inexplic-
able but beyond our power to handle or modify. Hence the
philosopher can have nothing to say about human destiny
or the effort to control the world except to deplore such
efforts as “cosmic impiety”.

As Gellner says, “This ignores history—is timeless and is
concerned with concepts or words as if they were eternal
and society never changed. Therefore this view signposts the
status quo and resists change.”**

This despairing attitude echoes the sermons of the theo-
logians whom Russell despises, who are also anxious to
convict us of cosmic impiety and convince us of the hope-
lessness of all attempts at human betterment.

“Somehow or other, by hook or by crook, this world must be
robbed of the importance which it has had in men’s minds
for the last hundred years. There is another world or order
of life which is more important still.”’??

We have to conclude that we fail to find in Russell’s
philosophy that organic unity of thought and reality which
alone can render knowledge intelligible and ethical judg-
ments valid. It is divorced from the stream of events in the

"™Gellner, Thought and Change.
* The Rev. D. R. Davies in a Broadcast address.

91

ever-changing reality. Even as a logic it fails. It is only in
epochs of philosophical decadence that logic reduces itself
to a merely formal discipline. Real logic is found by think-
ing about the nature of reality, not to interpret it, but to
alter it.

The Value of Philosophy

This might seem an ungenerous judgment on a man of
such distinction, but, as Wittgenstein says, we have to be-
ware of that philosophy which is no more than “the be-
witchment of intelligence by language”. Russell writes
beautifully and we are often swept along irresistibly by his
arguments. But someone has said that he is the only person
to be awarded the Order of Merit for writing bad philosophy
in impeccable English. He almost hints as much himself
when he tells us that “the British are distinguished among
the nations of modern Europe on the one hand by the excel-
lence of their philosophers, and on the other hand by their
contempt for philosophy. In both respects they show their
wisdom. But contempt for philosophy, if developed to the
point at which it becomes systematic, is itself a philosophy.
I suggest that philosophy, if it is bad philosophy, may be
dangerous, and therefore deserves that degree of negative
respect which we accord to lightning and tigers. What posi-
tive respect may be due to ‘good’ philosophy I will leave for
the moment an open question.””**

How are we to apply this evaluation to Russell’s own
philosophy? Is it a bad philosophy and highly dangerous?
Is it a good philosophy? In fact there is no Russellian
Philosophy, but only a series of studies of different aspects
of philosophy from the standpoint of “the hard facts
school”—the empiricists—in its modern logical form.
Russell makes no attempt to develop a consistent meta-
physic—in fact as each new phase runs into difficulties, it
is dropped and a new line of thought started. He has con-

* Philosophy and Politics.
92

fessed that for him credibility is more important than con-
sistency, and that a wholly consistent philosophy may be
wholly false. But in Russell’s case it is not only inconsistency
but a fatal contradiction that brings his thinking to an
impasse. He has written nothing of any consequence since
1940 when he published An Inquiry into Meaning and
Truth. He has from that time virtually ceased to philoso-
phise.

It would appear that his philosophy has involved itself in
a hopeless position—there can be nothing more to say; the
difficulties which confront it are insuperable. It does not
seem possible to draw the different threads of his thinking
together so as to escape the dilemmas before him. Chief
among these is the dichotomy between his logico-mathe-
matical metaphysics on the one hand and the categorical
imperative of his moral convictions on the other. So strongly
does he feel these that he has given up all further philo-
sophical enquiry and devoted the last twenty-seven years
almost entirely to social and political propaganda. But
he can find no endorsement of this dedication in his
philosophy—on the contrary it undermines it and negates
It.

Is it then a bad philosophy ? To answer that question we
have to note the important fact that Russell’s analytical
method as developed by Wittgenstein and his followers has
virtually swept the older metaphysical systems out of our
universities. There is hardly a chair of philosophy that is
not occupied by a represenative of the new school of Lin-
guistic Analysis or one of its derivatives. Is this simply dis-
aster? By no means. Empirical thinking has established itself
and the older speculative philosophy has faded away.
The influence of Hegel, Bradley, Bosanquet and the rest
on the thinking of intellectuals who are not professional
philosophers is at its lowest ebb. The search for total explana-
tions, for metaphysical answers to the problems of human
destiny has been abandoned by contemporary philosophy.

93

But analytical philosophy is still almost entirely negative
in its impact. It is not only empirical, that is to say based
on experience, but empiricist, that is to say limited by pres-
ent experience. It cannot get any farther than an enquiry
into how to state most clearly what we already know and
feel as to matters of fact and current moral judgments. It
“leaves everything as it is”. It cannot transcend the status
quo because to do so appears to empiricism to involve us in
metaphysics. For Russell, whose every instinct compels him
to reject what is generally “known” and “felt” in current
affairs, the self-contradictory present, the here and now,
must be transcended, whether his own philosophy allows
it or not. And it does not allow it, for it operates with a
methodology which leaves no room, no possibility, for the
speculative insight which demands the right to criticise
existing standards and social structures. Such criticism for
Russell, therefore, has to find its sanction in an emotionally-
based ethical commitment. From logic he is driven
irresistibly to mysticism.

Russell was never able to find a rational justification for
any law or theory behind the observed facts. The theory of
induction is the despair of analytical philosophy, and yet
nothing less than a theory which does transcend observation
can get us beyond the limits of the already known. Deprived
of that possibility reason can only summarise existing fact
or unfold tautologies. But that can do no more than reveal
what is already implied in present knowledge. This is the
utmost limit of Russell’s logical method. It can explain
nothing; it cannot go forward beyond the categories of the
present; it cannot attempt to show us in rational and critical
terms the path beyond what is to what might be.

Whitehead has pointed out that a man with a method
good for purposes of his restricted interests, may be a
pathological case in respect to the long range problems of
human life.* He is disposed to turn “an eye that is

“ Whitehead, The Function of Reason.

94

hae

characteristically cold on all questions of belief—questions
of a religious, moral, political or generally cosmic variety”,
as problems with which it has no concern.”® And the result
is not, as might have been expected, that nothing at all is
said. On the contrary if “for guidance in the problems of life
one must not seek it from thinkers or from thinking, one
must look to people who are not thinkers (but fools), to
processes that are not thinking (but passion), and to rules that
are not principles (but rules of expedience).”’"*

It would seem, therefore, that in so far as Russell has
in his philosophical thinking done no more than show us
how to regulate the expression of our thought in logical
terms, and within the limits of the accepted “forms of life’,
as Wittgenstein calls them, the more we are compelled to
exclude the ideas and conjectures, the criticism and enlight-
enment which transcend the categories of the present and
escape its methodology.

But Russell has only discovered one form of reasoning,
that of his logical system, his methodology; but there is
another reason which surveys the processes and the aims of
any system, and judges and understands. The Greeks have
given us two figures which conform to these notions—
Plato and Ulysses. The one shares reason with the gods,
the other shares it with the foxes. Logical system operates
within the given process of any system, it is a factor within
the world and is concerned with immediate methods of
action. Reason as understanding asserts itself above the
system to criticise its shortcomings and point the way for-
ward to a fundamental modification of society. The mathe-
matician, the man of business and the politician are all
empiricists and confine their reasoning to their immediate
ends. The more clearly they grasp the intellectual analysis
of the method of regulating the necessary procedures, the
more likely are they to reject any form of reasoning which

* Warnock, British Philosophy Science 1900.
* Collingwood, Autobiography.
95

:

goes beyond their present interests. “Some of the major dis- |
asters of mankind have been produced by the narrowness

of men with a good methodology. Ulysses has no use for
Plato, and the bones of his companions are strewn on many

a reef and many an isle.””

Nothing can be more disastrous than the self-satisfied
dogmatism with which mankind at each period of its history
cherishes the “forms of life” reflecting its existing know-
ledge and ways of living. A self-satisfied rationalism of this
sort is in effect a form of anti-rationalism. It means an
arbitrary halt at a particular set of social categories. Russell
rejects those of his time with his emotions, but with his mind
he has forged a system of logical analysis which petrifies
thought by limiting it to handling propositions reflecting
things as they are. But the essence of life is to be found only
in the frustration of established order. “If we construe the
new epoch in terms of the forms of order of its predecessor,
we see mere confusion.”’** We require philosophy to do more
than that, it has to explain the rise of new types of order,
the transition from type to type. A frozen, motionless uni-
verse can at the most be the type of pure logical system, with
the bare comment—That is so.

™ Whitehead, The Function of Reason.
* Whitehead, Modes of Thought.

After taking a degree in science at University College,
London, JOHN LEWIS went to Cambridge where he
was a pupil of the Hegelian philosopher J. McTaggart
Ellis McTaggart. Here, as a member of the Moral Sciences
Club, he first met Bertrand Russell and also G. E. Moore.
Subsequently he was awarded a doctorate in philosophy for
his thesis on “Irrationalist Tendencies in Modern Philo-
sophy”. For many years he lectured in philosophy for the
Extra-Mural Department of the Universities of Oxford and
Cambridge, and is now lecturing in philosophy at Morley
College, London.

He has written books on anthropology, comparative
religion and sociology. Among his recent publications are
An Introduction to Philosophy, Teach Yourself the History
of Philosophy, Science, Faith and Scepticism, and Man and
Evolution.

His new book on Bertrand Russell, Philosopher and
Humanist is a study, at once sympathetic, popular and pro-
found, of the life and work of England’s most influential
living philosopher. John Lewis acutely traces out the tension
between Russell’s abstruse mathematical philosophy and
his humanist beliefs, and at the same time subjects to a
penetrating criticism both his abstract logical analysis and
his views on contemporary society.

LAWRENCE AND WISHART LTD.
46 Bedford Row, London, W.C.1

The photograph on the front of the cover, showing Bertrand Russell
at the sit-down in Trafalgar Square, London, organised on 18th
February 1961 by the Committee of 100 as a protest against nuclear
armament (for which action Russell was subsequently awarded a
sentence of imprisonment by the Metropolitan Magistrates), is
reproduced by kind permission of The Morning Star.

Ee EEE C'